The Ringside Tracker
Better data in,
better data out
Our first-party tracker runs from your domain, counts your whole audience, and is configured and maintained by us.
Why we don’t rely on external tracking
Most measurement problems aren’t output problems. They’re collection problems.
A tag fires twice. Someone adjusts a campaign at 11pm and tells no-one. A checkout step stops reporting after a theme update and nobody notices it for five weeks. By the time you need good data, the bad data is already baked in.
That’s why we built our own tracker. We’re responsible for the data going in, we understand the data going in, and that puts us in the best position to make sense of it afterwards.
Here’s how the tracker sits in the Ringside ecosystem:
Satellite Data
+ POS, your CRM, CSVs, etc.
Martech Platforms
+ ad platforms, costs, MVT, etc.
Your website
Ringside Tracker
Web analytics; page views,
events, leads, sales, etc.
Aggregation, processing,
machine learning, etc.
Data Access
+ AWS, Excel, SQL, etc.
Ringside
Dashboard
First party
...and designed to stay out of the way
The tracker is served from a subdomain of your website, not ours. That makes it genuinely first party, avoids sending tracking requests to a third-party domain, and means browser cookie rules apply to it as part of your own site.
It’s also small. Three non-blocking files load without holding up anything your visitor is waiting for. An active example from one of our larger client sites:
| File | Size |
|---|---|
| Tag | ~7 KB |
| Configuration | ~5 KB |
| Event collection | ~55 KB |
On the largest site we run, each loads in under 50 milliseconds. For comparison, the Google Tag Manager container we replaced on that same site is 178 KB before anything inside it fires.
There’s no tag manager between Ringside and your site, and no chain of tags waiting on each other.
For brands that want the longest measurement window possible, there’s also an optional server-side step. It’s a small endpoint on your own infrastructure that we’ll walk your developers through, and it stays within what the browser permits.
What we collect
Everything you’d expect from web analytics, plus the bits that often get lost along the way.
- Visits, entrances, page views, bounces, new and returning users
- Events, from deliberate actions like form submissions and video plays to things like reaching a product page or a particular part of the site
- Conversions and revenue, including items, baskets, SKUs, discounts, shipping and tax
- Campaign data from every arriving link, including platform campaign, ad group, ad and keyword IDs, not just UTMs
- Multivariate test names and variants
- Device, browser, operating system and screen
- Country, region and city, resolved without storing the visitor’s IP address
- Anything else you put into your data layer that’s useful to your marketing, with as many custom fields as you need
What we don’t (and won’t) collect: names, email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses or anything else that identifies a person. We collect the fields we’ve explicitly configured, rather than scraping whatever happens to be on the page, so personal data in your data layer stays there.
Check it yourself
Our Chrome extension shows you what your site is sending to Ringside as it happens: page views, events and test variants, all in real time.
So if you want to check what’s being collected, you can see it for yourself.
Campaign mistakes don’t have to stay mistakes
Someone forgets a UTM. An agency changes the naming convention. An influencer tags the wrong campaign. Most analytics will faithfully report that mistake for as long as the data exists.
Ringside can correct it.
We collect the platform’s own campaign, ad group, ad and keyword IDs alongside your UTMs, and match those back to the data coming directly from the platform. We intelligently classify traffic ourselves, using more than a single parameter to decide where your visit belongs.
It means we’re not completely dependent on whatever happened to be in your URL when somebody clicked it. And if something still ends up in the wrong place? We can fix it, including the reporting that’s already been collected.
A badly tagged campaign doesn’t need to poison a quarter’s worth of numbers.
We set it up,
we keep it working
Getting Ringside onto your site is usually one DNS change and one line of code. On Shopify, it’s one DNS change and a custom pixel instead.
From there, we do the work. We configure the tracker around the data you already have, and we’ll happily leverage your existing GA setup. If you have a good data layer, great. If you don’t, we can often work from the structure of the site. If something genuinely needs development on your side, you’ll know before you sign anything.
And then we keep looking after it. We manage the events, make changes as your site or marketing changes, and fix things when we spot that something isn’t behaving as it should. Need a new event, a different campaign taxonomy or tracking for a new market? Ask us and we’ll get it done. No change request, no quote.
If you’re rebuilding or replatforming, bring us in early and we’ll make sure the tracking moves with you.
You can read more on our Support & Onboarding page →