Cookieless Google Analytics

UpdatedMay 31, 2021

•2 min read•View as Markdown

Thomas Portelange

A Web Developer based in Belgium, specialized in PHP & JS development

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LeKoala Dev Blog

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Don't use a cookie

So this is more tricky because we need a unique id for each user. Obviously you can start a session for each user and use the session id as a reference. You can do this by using the following snippet when initializing Google Analytics:

ga('create', 'YOUR-GA-TRACKING-CODE', { 'storage': 'none', 'clientId': '<YOUR_USER_ID_HERE>' });

But what if you are not using a session (eg: using cache) ? Then you have a problem. There are libs out there like fingerprintjs that helps to generate a unique token for a user, but again: do you really want to add one more library to your website ?

So here is what I'm using:

Generate a reasonably unique hash based on some unique values, including the IP address.

This last part is a bit tricky : either you have to provide it with php (again, no luck if you cache your webpages) or make a call to an external IP service (here, I'm using AWS)

And then, boom, you are good to go! The price to pay here is the extra http request to query the IP address on each page, but it's either that or not being able to cache your pages so probably this is worth the extra query.

Cookieless Google Analytics

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More from this blog

A git diff with all changed and new unstaged files

Writing a Zero-Dependency CSV and XLSX Reader/Writer

Media Queries Level 5 are awesome

Modern tooltips

Using Dialog elements today

What we need to fix

Anonymize IP address

Command Palette

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More from this blog

What we need to fix

Anonymize IP address

Don't use a cookie