Statistics without cookies: what you can know about your visits

With their site's statistics, most musicians do one of two things. Some never open them. Others install a large tool that comes with a cookie banner and a hundred charts nobody can read. There is something simpler in between, and it answers the questions that matter: how many people visit, where they are, and what brought them.

This post covers what you can know without cookies, what you can't, and which figures help you decide something.

What a cookie is and why the banner appears

A cookie is a small file that a site stores in a visitor's browser so it can recognise them later. Some uses are helpful: a cookie is what keeps you signed in. Others follow a person from one visit to the next, or from one site to another. Many statistics and advertising tools work the second way.

In Europe, broadly speaking, you need someone's permission before you store that kind of thing in their browser to follow them. That is why the banner exists. A tool that counts visits without storing anything in the browser and without recognising anyone has nothing to ask. That is the underlying idea. It isn't legal advice, and if your situation has particular features, check it.

The statistics are not the only thing your site loads. An embedded YouTube video, an external player, a map or an advertising pixel can set cookies of their own, even if your statistics set none.

What you can know without cookies

A tool that recognises no one can still count quite a lot:

• Views per day. How many times your site was opened, day by day.
• Approximate visitors. How many different people came, counted without keeping who they are. It is an estimate, and that is enough.
• Countries. Where visits come from, worked out from the connection. A VPN can throw it off now and then, but overall it holds.
• Where they came from. The site that carried the link: a search engine, Instagram, a festival's page, a newspaper.

A serious tool also leaves robots out: search engines, link checkers, the previews that messaging apps load. If it doesn't, your figures are inflated and you won't know.

What you cannot know (and do not need to)

You won't know who came in. You won't know whether the programmer you wrote to on Tuesday opened your press kit, whether the same person came back three times this week, or how old they are. A musician almost never needs any of that.

The signal that counts is someone writing to you, and no chart will show you that. If you want to know whether someone read your proposal, the honest way is to ask them, or to wait for a request through the form.

The figures that help you decide

Statistics are only worth something if they change what you do. These are the questions they answer best.

Where do the people who book you come from? Say you have written to venues in one country. If visits from that country rise over the next few days, someone is looking. If nothing moves, perhaps the email went unopened, or the link was somewhere nobody could see it.

Which link works? Look at where visits come from. If nearly all of them arrive from Instagram, your bio link is working harder than anything else and deserves to be kept current; we cover it in link in bio for musicians. If an interview in a magazine keeps sending visits for weeks, you know who to write to again with the next record.

What happens before and after a release or a tour? A figure on its own says little. Next to your own ordinary week, it says a lot.

1. Two weeks beforeNote your average views per day and the three places most visits come from.
2. Release dayShare the link in each place separately, not everywhere at once.
3. The week afterSee which new place shows up among the ones sending the most visits.
4. A month laterCompare the average with the one before: what remains is what really grew.

When something does not add up

Sometimes the figures show something you didn't expect. Look closer.

• Visits from a country where you have done nothing. Check where they come from. It could be a radio station, a playlist or an article you didn't know about, and it is a good reason to write to venues there.
• An unfamiliar site among the ones sending you visits. Open it. Sometimes it is a listings page or a blog that wrote about you. Thank them, and ask them to link to your site instead of a profile.
• A sudden jump that nothing you did explains. It may be automated traffic that slipped through. Wait to see whether it happens again before you draw any conclusion.
• Visits that drop off a cliff. Check that your site works, and that the link on your profiles isn't broken or pointing to an old address.

Reading them without fooling yourself

With small numbers it is easy to see things that aren't there. A few habits help:

Many visits show up as direct, with no source. That happens when someone types your address by hand, or opens the link from an email or a chat, because those apps don't always pass on where the visit came from. A rise in direct visits right after you send a round of emails is usually exactly that.

In Pages

Studio has its own statistics, with no cookies and no banner. They show views per day, countries and where visitors came from. Visits are counted without identifying anyone, robots are left out, and there is nothing to install. Embedded players, videos and maps load only when the visitor clicks on them, so they set no cookies until someone has chosen to play them. To see what else to check on your site from a booker's point of view, read what a booker looks for on your site.

1,284Views

812Visitors

Views per day

Countries

• Spain48%
• France17%
• Germany9%
• United States7%

Where they came from

• Instagram41%
• Google28%
• Direct or unknown19%