Who is visiting your site

Visitor numbers are built in and always on, with no cookies and nothing for you to set up. If you want Google Analytics as well, you can have that too.

The short version

Built-in analytics is on for every site, free, from day one.
It uses no cookies, so it triggers no consent banner.
Numbers are on your website overview, once the site is live.
Google Analytics is available on every site as well.
Adding other people's tracking is what makes a consent banner appear.

What you get without doing anything

Visits and visitors over time, which pages are being read, where people came from, and what they are using to browse. Enough to answer the questions a small business actually has.

It appears on your website overview once the site is live. Before you publish there is nothing to measure, so nothing is shown.

Our analytics does not use cookies and does not follow anybody between sites. It cannot tell that today's visitor is the same person as yesterday's.

That is why your site does not need to ask permission for it. The banner laws are about tracking people, and this deliberately does not.

What "visits" means here

A visit is one person on one day. Somebody who comes back three days running counts as three, because we have no way to know it was the same person, and we would rather say so than invent a number.

One consequence worth knowing: your own visits are counted too. When you have just published something and are checking it, expect the numbers to include you.

Google Analytics

Add your measurement ID and we put the Google tag on every page for you. Available on every site.

Worth adding if you already use Google Analytics or want its depth. Not worth adding just to have it: it is a heavier tool than most small businesses need, and it does bring the consent banner with it.

Getting into Google and Bing

Both let you verify that a site is yours, which unlocks their tools for seeing what people searched to find you. Each gives you a verification tag, and there is a box for each in your analytics settings.

You can paste snippets from other analytics or advertising tools. This is where the consent banner comes from.

Third-party tracking generally does use cookies and does follow people between sites, so a site carrying it has to ask. When you add a snippet, your site shows a consent banner and those scripts do not run until a visitor accepts.

That is not a setting you can switch off, and it is the reason to think before adding a tool you do not really need. Every one of them costs you a banner and some visitors' patience.