Cookieless Analytics
Because everyone
should count
Track the people who opt-in and count everybody else.
Traffic, conversions and media spend included.
What happens in most analytics platforms when someone declines your cookie banner?
Nothing.
The visit isn’t recorded. The pages aren’t counted. And if that person goes on to buy something, the sale either shows up with no marketing source attached or doesn’t show up at all.
You still paid for the click.
How much this matters varies a lot by sector, country and the way your banner is set up. We’ve seen opt-in rates high enough that the gap barely matters, and low enough to completely change the economics of a channel.
But whatever the number is on your site, most analytics platforms treat the missing traffic as if it never happened.
What Ringside does instead
User accepts
We track normally. A pseudonymous identifier connects pages into visits and visits into a journey, across devices where we can. This is the group we use to model everything else.
User declines
We don’t identify or track them, and we don’t stitch their activity together. But we still count it. Page views, events, leads and sales are recorded as activity, without being tied to a person or connected to another page.
Never responds
We treat them the same as someone who declines, unless they later say otherwise. If they consent, the page they’re on becomes the first page of a tracked visit. Everything before that remains counted, but never becomes tracked.
We don’t fingerprint. We don’t use session cookies to get around consent. We don’t track people across other websites, and we never hold personal information.
accept
Ringside continues to see users→
decline
undecided
user trackingMost analytics
user tracking
What this means for you
When we aggregate the data, we use the behaviour of consenting visitors to estimate what the rest are likely to have done. That gives you a more complete picture.
It is a model, and we label it as one. And it’s based on your own users, not a benchmark borrowed from somebody else’s website.
The consent page
We haven’t seen another attribution platform with a screen like this.
It puts accepted, declined and undecided traffic next to each other, across visits, conversions, conversion rate, revenue, bounce rate and media cost.
You can trend it over time to see what changed after a banner update, where people are ignoring the banner, or perhaps more importantly - see which campaigns, landing pages and traffic sources are driving the biggest differences in opt-in rates.
It’s time we talked about hard bounces
Some visitors land, see the banner, and leave without ever interacting with it or anything else. We call those hard bounces.
If they never consent, traditional analytics never records the visit. You paid for the click, they left without doing anything, and as far as your reporting is concerned they were never there.
Using round numbers to keep the maths simple:
- £400,000 of ad spend produces 280,000 visits.
- That’s roughly £1.43 a visit.
- 24,000 of those visits (about 8.6%) hard bounce.
- That’s around £34,000 of invisible spend your other analytics never captured.
Whatever your number is, Ringside shows you how big it is, what it’s costing you, and which campaigns and landing pages are producing it.
Keeping your
legal team happy
We built it this way because when somebody says they don’t want to be tracked, we think that answer should mean something.
If a visitor declines, we don’t track them. The value comes from still being able to count what happened, not from finding another way to identify or follow them.
Nothing we hold identifies an individual. We don’t share or sell the data, and we don’t track people across different websites.