i want to know which button people click. i don't want to know who clicked it.
most analytics tools treat those as the same question. they're not.
i'm om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer. i build cloudline, a cookieless analytics tool. day 28 of 90, building in public.
how click tracking usually works
open any analytics tool's click feature. it's usually a session replay, or a heatmap of real cursors on your actual page.
those need to follow one person around your site. that takes an identity: a cookie, a session id, something that says "this click and that scroll belong to the same visitor". the click count you see is built on top of that identity.
how cloudline does it
you put data-cloudline-track="signup" on a button. or you call Cloudline.track('click', {label}) from your own code.
the label you chose gets stored. the page gets stored. the count goes up. nothing else.
no cookies, no ip addresses, no user agents, no session ids. a click is a number attached to a page. no trail, no person.
what i gave up
i can't tell you if the same person clicked twice. i can't tie a click to the visitor who scrolled to 100% and then left. there is no heatmap of actual cursors, because there are no cursors to record.
that's the trade, and i'd rather name it than hide it.
why this is the shape i want
the whole product works like this. a pageview stores four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. that's the entire row. clicks fit the same shape: label, page, count.
funnels are built from these counts. pageviews and clicks in order, showing where people drop off. nothing in them knows who anyone is.
the part that changed how i read
this changed how i read other tools' privacy pages. "we don't track individuals" next to a feature called session replay. a replay needs a session. a session is an identity wearing a mask.
i'm not naming anyone. but if a tool needs to recognise you to count you, the count is the smaller feature and the recognition is the bigger one.
two days to launch
day 30 of this plan was always launch day. it's two days away now. the click tracking you just read about is the kind of thing launching with it: small, named, and honest about what it doesn't do.
day 28 of 90. still building.
cloudline is free while in early access. no card.
— om
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