So if you don't use cookies how do you report on new vs returning users? This is pretty important for a website. If you don't have the ability to look at a device behaviour over multiple sessions you are very limited in your understanding of customers and your product. As you mentioned Google analytics is free but uses your data. That's why we also have something called Google Search, Google Maps and so on for FREE. Finally, of you are a small businesses which wants to promote its brand, what's wrong with doing retargeting and leverage Google Ads ecosystem?
Instead of setting a cookie with a unique user ID, we simply count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website to determine the visitor count.
To enhance the visitor privacy, we don’t actually store the raw visitor IP address in our database or logs. We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover.
To further enhance visitor privacy, we add the website domain to their IP hash. This means that the same user will never have the same IP hash on two different websites. If we didn’t do this, the hash would effectively act like a third-party (cross-domain) cookie.
Network Address Translation allows many unique users to share the same public IP address. For this reason we also add the User-Agent string to the hash, although we don’t store the actual User-Agent string.
There's some more detail on what we collect and how we do it in our data policy.
But what if their IP are changed? For example, they can change between different wifi/mobile networks. And on mobile network, some carriers actually assign a different IP if the user disconnect from mobile network for a long time.
If they change the IP they will be counted as another visitor. Similar as in if someone blocks/deletes their cookies, they become new visitors too. Not having to show a cookie banner is a worthwhile tradeoff for many sites though.
Like mentioned in the post, Plausible is not meant as a clone or a full blown replacement of Google Analytics. Some people are fine running GA and are happy to use Google Ads and the rest of the Google ecosystem. On the other hand, some would prefer to focus more on privacy of their visitors or on not having to get cookie / GDPR consent etc. Plausible is more meant for those use cases.
I've answered the new vs returning aspect in another reply.
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So if you don't use cookies how do you report on new vs returning users? This is pretty important for a website. If you don't have the ability to look at a device behaviour over multiple sessions you are very limited in your understanding of customers and your product. As you mentioned Google analytics is free but uses your data. That's why we also have something called Google Search, Google Maps and so on for FREE. Finally, of you are a small businesses which wants to promote its brand, what's wrong with doing retargeting and leverage Google Ads ecosystem?
I'm curious to learn about the new vs returning metric as well.
Here's how it's counted:
Instead of setting a cookie with a unique user ID, we simply count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website to determine the visitor count.
To enhance the visitor privacy, we don’t actually store the raw visitor IP address in our database or logs. We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover.
To further enhance visitor privacy, we add the website domain to their IP hash. This means that the same user will never have the same IP hash on two different websites. If we didn’t do this, the hash would effectively act like a third-party (cross-domain) cookie.
Network Address Translation allows many unique users to share the same public IP address. For this reason we also add the User-Agent string to the hash, although we don’t store the actual User-Agent string.
There's some more detail on what we collect and how we do it in our data policy.
But what if their IP are changed? For example, they can change between different wifi/mobile networks. And on mobile network, some carriers actually assign a different IP if the user disconnect from mobile network for a long time.
If they change the IP they will be counted as another visitor. Similar as in if someone blocks/deletes their cookies, they become new visitors too. Not having to show a cookie banner is a worthwhile tradeoff for many sites though.
Like mentioned in the post, Plausible is not meant as a clone or a full blown replacement of Google Analytics. Some people are fine running GA and are happy to use Google Ads and the rest of the Google ecosystem. On the other hand, some would prefer to focus more on privacy of their visitors or on not having to get cookie / GDPR consent etc. Plausible is more meant for those use cases.
I've answered the new vs returning aspect in another reply.