your dashboard says visitors spend four minutes on your pricing page. the tab was open in the background the whole time.
i'm om yaduvanshi. i'm 18, an applied ai developer building cloudline, a cookieless google analytics alternative. one script tag, under 2 KB, no cookies, no stored ips. this continues my series on tracking the web without tracking people. so far i've covered referrers, scroll depth, funnels, and button clicks.
time on page is a number that lies
most analytics tools compute time on page by subtracting the first event timestamp from the last. one pageview and no second event, and they guess. a tab left open while you made lunch counts as a deeply engaged reader.
it gets worse. that number pretends to describe a person. cookie tools stitch your pageviews into a session, then average. the average is of people who may not exist.
what engaged time actually measures
cloudline measures something smaller and more honest. how long a page holds attention while it is visible.
that phrasing is deliberate. the script counts the page only while it is being looked at. not who is looking. when the tab is hidden or the window is minimized, the clock stops. when you come back, it resumes. nothing about the visitor gets stored to make that work.
the dashboard pairs engaged time with scroll depth, because time alone still lies. a page with two minutes of engaged time and 100% scroll depth got read. two minutes and 25% scroll depth is a page someone left open while they did something else.
attention doesn't need an identity
this is the part that surprised me when i built it. measuring attention does not require identifying anyone.
in cookie tools, time on page is a property of a session. it belongs to a person. in cloudline, engaged time is a property of the page. the page held attention for this long, across all the visits. nobody's visits get connected to each other.
that's the whole privacy story, really. you can know how your content performs without knowing who performed it.
the honest limit
aggregation has a cost. cloudline can't tell you that the visitor who spent four minutes on pricing also read the docs. 40 visits of three minutes each might be one loyal reader or 40 drive-bys. the dashboard counts visits and engaged time separately and doesn't pretend to connect them.
for the question most site owners actually ask, which pages hold attention and which don't, the aggregate is enough. a page with attention and no clicks has a call-to-action problem. i wrote about that part yesterday: https://dev.to/omyvnss/how-i-track-button-clicks-without-cookies-33ko
if you haven't installed yet, it's one line:
<script src="https://trycloudline.space/tracker.js" data-site-id="YOUR-SITE-ID"></script>
takes under a minute. removing it is deleting the line.
cloudline is free for early users while i keep building it. cookieless analytics in one line of code.
— om yaduvanshi
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