Cookieless Backend Server Tracking for Google Analytics – WordPress Plugin

Get rid of the cookie banner with this plugin and the correct privacy settings. And gather important insights by seeing ALL users in your tracking, and not only users without blockers. Decide with data you want to sent to google. Depending on your local laws and plugin settings you might not need a cookie banner. Make your Analytics tracking invisible for tracking/ad blockers.

BE AWARE
This plugin uses server to server tracking. On the one hand it is a big advantage, because nothing is happening in the browser of the user. On the other Hand this means: every page you want to track need to processed by PHP.
So if you have a caching plugin or cloudflare caching or similiar it won’t work, because you will only track thoses hits which really hit the server.

Plugin Features

1. Cookieless tracking
2. Hide all user and PII Data from Google -> get rid of cookie banner if your privacy laws allow it.
3. Compare cookieless tracking vs. backend cookie vs. GA Library Cookie
4. Enhanced Ecommerce Purchase Tracking intgration with woocommerce
5. Enhanced Ecommerce checkout steps for Checkout Behaviour Analysis Report
6. Enhanced Ecommerce purchase actions for Shopping Behaviour Analysis Report
7. Sent Tracking hit to a custom URL, not to GA or to both.
8. Opt out link via shortcode.
9. Obey Do Not Track header.
10. Use existing opt out cookie.
11. Anonymizeip
12. A lot of debugging options
13. Creates an own client id.
14. woocoommerce support, but works without woocommerce as well.

Important: Recommendation is not to mix frontend tracking data with data from this plugin. Please create a separate property or view for the tracking data from this plugin.
If you mix the data you probably will get duplicate hits.

This Plugin uses the google analytics measurement protocol to send server to server tracking requests. The Tracking is not detectable in the frontend, which means it can not be blocked by ad blocker.
This Plugin is not affected by newest ITP of Apples Safari or any other tracking/ad blocking technology. It will be only affected if no cookies are allowed to save.

Biggest advantage: Don’t send any user data to google and tracking not affected by ad blocker.
Biggest downside: with backend tracking not all data is available, so e.g. page titles and screen sizes are not available.

Use this plugin as addition to your existing frontend tracking, to see the impact of ad blockers or use it as your only tracking solution.
Recommendation is, to use it in addition to existing frontend tracking.

Cookieless tracking
To activate cookieless tracking: General > Client ID Generation > cookieless
It uses a very simple fingerprint. It is a hash from Useragent, IP and browser do not track header.
Advantage of using such a simple fingerprint is, that it is not blocked by any browser.
Disadvantage is that it is only stable as long as the IP adress is not changing. Which it does mostly every 24h.
This is still better as having a new user for each page view, which happens if the browsers block tracking cookies. With this setting you make sure to have a stable session for each user.

Cookieless tracking with Reset at midnight
It is similiar to cookieless tracking with an important differences: The User identifier is resetet everday at midnight. So you are only able to track a user during one day. If he comes back the next day he will get a new identifier.
Why should you do that? Because depending of your local laws you do not gather “user information” anymore. With this setting you might not need a consent for tracking anymore, because you do not track the user.

compare cid generator methods
Check “Advanced > Compare different cid generator methods” to compare different cid generation methods.
The following will be compared:
1. cookieless from this plugin
2. tracking cookie from this plugin
3. If available: tracking cookie generated by Google Analytics frontend library: _ga cookie. (Must have implemented Standard GA Frontend tracking)

The test data should go in a separated test property. You need to create a custom dimensions which is populated with the type of cid:
1. created by plugin
2. cookieless
3. created by GA library

If you like to share your results I am happy to hear from you.

Notes for woocommerce integration
1. gross prices are tracked.
2. product tags are tracked as brand in GA.
3. Enhanced Ecommerce is not fully implemented yet. It will evolve release by release. If you have any feature wishes please use the WP Support Forum of this Plugin.
4. For technical reasons the add to cart event is not logged to the frontend. But you see it in the logs.