pageviews tell you someone saw your pricing page. they don't tell you if anyone clicked the button.
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 done referrers, scroll depth, and funnels.
the gap between seeing and clicking
a pageview is a weak signal. it says a browser loaded a page. it says nothing about intent.
the button is where intent lives. someone pressing "get early access" is a different event from someone loading the page that holds it. most analytics tools record both and tie them to a person. cloudline can't tie anything to anyone, so clicks had to work another way.
mark the button, store the label
tracking a button in cloudline takes one attribute:
<button data-cloudline-track="get-early-access">get early access</button>
that's it. when the button is clicked, cloudline records the label and nothing else. not the cursor position, not a session id. the label is the whole record.
for clicks fired from javascript, there's a tiny api:
Cloudline.track('click', { label: 'get-early-access' });
same deal. the label goes in, nothing about the visitor comes with it.
why i don't capture every click automatically
most tools listen to every click on the page and sort it out later. i went the other way on purpose.
auto-capture means deciding later what's personal and what isn't. explicit labels move that decision to the button, made once by the person who built the page. you pick what to measure. the tool can't surprise you with data you never asked for.
it also keeps the script small. auto-capture needs more listeners and more code to maintain. one attribute needs a single event listener.
where the clicks show up
clicks land in the dashboard grouped by label, per page. which buttons get pressed on which pages, that's the view. they also slot into funnels: a pageview, then a button click, then another pageview. i wrote about that part here: https://dev.to/omyvnss/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies-5fd1
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.
the honest limit
a click with no identity can't tell you whether the person who clicked did anything else. 40 clicks on "get early access" and 12 signups might be the same people. might not be. cloudline counts the clicks and the signups separately and doesn't pretend to connect them.
the separate counts are usually enough. a button with views and no clicks has a button problem, and the numbers say that much on their own.
cloudline is free for early users while i keep building it. cookieless analytics in one line of code.
— om yaduvanshi
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