Cookieless website analytics
"Cookieless analytics" means a visitor is counted without a cookie, without local storage and without any identifier that follows them from one day or one site to the next. Railyard Insights is built that way end to end.
How Railyard Insights counts a visitor without a cookie
- A visitor is a one-way hash of their IP address, browser string and a secret that changes every UTC day. The hash is computed in memory for that one request and the IP address itself is never written anywhere.
- Nothing is stored in the browser: no cookie, no
localStorage, no fingerprinting script that tries to re-identify the same device across days. - Because the salt rotates daily, the same visitor on two different days produces two different hashes; there is no way to link them back to one person over time.
- A browser sending Do Not Track is not counted at all; bots, crawlers, link-preview fetchers and prefetch requests are dropped before anything is stored.
Why this matters
A cookie-based analytics tool stores a unique id in the visitor's browser, so it can recognize the same person on their next visit. That id is personal data under most privacy law, which is why cookie-based analytics usually needs a consent banner. A script that never sets that id, and never stores the raw IP address either, counts unique visitors per day without collecting the personal data a banner exists to ask permission for.
What you get
- Visitors and page views over the last 7, 30 or 90 days.
- Top pages and top referrers, with
utm_sourceper campaign link. - Custom events: call
railyard.track("signup")and see the count. - Real-visitor page speed: LCP, INP and CLS at the 75th percentile.
One script tag, a private dashboard link mailed to you, free for up to 10,000 stored events a month. Read exactly what is and is not stored.