A better way to analyse website audience

Privacy-first or privacy-friendly web analytics solutions such as Wide Angle Analytics can be used to gather metrics and key performance indicators without compromising visitors' privacy. Privacy-first analytics are the closest solution you can get to 1st party analytics without the cost and burden of maintaining your software, service, and infrastructure.

A privacy-friendly service will focus on keeping users' data collection as minimal as possible. These services won’t track you across other websites and won’t use questionable identification practices.

Data will never be shared with a third party in privacy-first web analytics.

Cookie-less web analytics do not use browser cookies to track and re-identify users. Wide Angle Analytics offers various mechanism for privacy-friendly activity tracking which does not rely on cookies.

In cookie-less mode, Wide Angle Analytics can only track a user session over the course of a single day, after which the identifier is non-reversibly hashed and can never be tied back to the individual or their session.

To put it simply, Cookie Banner is a form of consent management allowing websites to save non-essential (tracking) cookies in your browser.

While the name Cookie Banner is commonly used, the consent forms you find on websites are frequently mentioning policies going beyond cookies.

Nowadays, Cookie Banners are used to collect visitors and users consent, allowing for storing tracking cookies as well as collecting and processing Personal Data.

According to the jurisdiction they operate from and in, website owners and operators have numerous obligations regarding what needs to be present in such Cookie Banners.

Short answer: No, you don't need Cookie Banner.
Long answer: You should consult your privacy lawyer or your data protection officer, as laws and regulations of your country or the country you operate in may force you to collect explicit consent.

Wide Angle Analytics does not store any Personal Data by default. As a nature of our service, we will have brief access to the website visitor IP address, but we will promptly anonymize it using non-reversible algorithm.

Under the definition of GDPR, no data will ever leave the European Union or the European Economic Area. Moreover, Wide Angle Analytics operates exclusively and completely within the European Union.

We will never share your data with a third party. We will use the data solely to provide you with the service you have agreed to in our Terms and Conditions.

These features of Wide Angle Analytics mean that you can safely use our service without Cookie Banner.

If you start collecting Personal Data or opt-in for more advanced tracking mechanisms offered by Wide Angle Analytics, you will need to establish appropriate consent mechanisms.

Input Objects GmbH, the company behind Wide Angle Analytics, is based in Berlin, Germany.

Wide Angle Analytics is truly European Web Analytics. Our services are based on European cloud providers.

We are taking privacy and regulation to the next level. We operate under zero trust when it comes to US, Chinese and Russian surveillance laws, and therefore we are not using infrastructure under control of these governments or companies from these countries.

As a European web analytics platform, we care deeply about data sovereignty. We only work with data processor and vendors who share our values and are located in countries with compatible laws.

Every plan of Wide Angle Analytics gives you the ability to use a Custom Domain and our publishing API. These two tools offer you a complete solution to provide reliable web analytics without gaps that stem from unfair Adblockers.

With custom domain, you make it appear as if the tracker script was coming from your domain. We are fully aware that our default tracking domain, the stats.wideangle.co is already listed by major Adblockers. Almost every web analytics solution is listed. That's why, provide support for a custom domain that can make your analytics script look unique and not be blocked. This feature tricks close to 99% of popular Adblockers.

How about that last percent? Or maybe you would like to have more control regarding ingestion and even control how you identify your users? Our publishing API allows you to push events to Wide Angle Analytics from your back-end service, server-side. Our API gives you full control over how you collect data on your website.

Google Analytics is used all over the Internet. And no wonder, it is free and available for more than a decade. However, it comes with two major warnings.

When you add Google Analytics script to your website, you are enabling Google to track Internet users as they browse the Internet. This information feeds to a vast Google data collection machine which then fuels a plethora of Google's services. Some of these services include Google Ads business.

Think about it. You are handing over information about your visitors to an organization, which can then enable your competition to produce a more effective ad campaign.

Secondly, Google Analytics or Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, are very complex to set up, especially in context of GDPR. Numerous European countries have classified Google Analytics usage illegal under GDPR unless additional security measures are implemented. Google Analytics 4, the next version, offers some interesting privacy settings. The privacy community has already raised concerns whether these will be sufficient, but a formal ruling is yet to come.

General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, is a law. If you handle, process or store data of people from European Union, you must comply with GDPR.

If you fail to do so, you can face a hefty fine. The fines can reach 4% of your annual revenue, or €20 million Euro. Whichever is higher.

But even if we put law and crippling fines aside, being GDPR-compliant has additional benefits.

By adhering to GDPR, you have a good chance of respecting your visitor's and user's privacy.

Articles of GDPR force you to consider data security and data retention.

The dreaded documentation and paperwork will force you to thoroughly review your sub-processors and service vendors.

It is not a perfect regulation, often criticized for its complexity, but it is also the first comprehensive law, with global impact, shifting the balance towards individuals privacy.