Web analytics: the snippet on your pages

One script on every page measures it, from any website and any stack. It writes nothing to the visitor's device: no cookie, no local storage, nothing to consent to. Paste it once, before the closing </body> tag, with one of the project's publishable keys:

<script defer src="https://backendfree.com/static/webanalytics/a.js" data-site="pk_live_..."></script>
<noscript><img src="https://backendfree.com/collect/p.gif?k=pk_live_...&u=/" alt="" width="1" height="1"></noscript>

The <noscript> line counts a visitor without JavaScript, as a page view of the address in u.

The websites a key may report from

A live key's hits are recorded only from the hostnames on the project's Tracking screen, under Websites: a publishable key sits in the page source of every site using it, and that list is what stops somebody else's pages spending your month. A site on both salon.example and www.salon.example needs both listed, since a browser sends whichever one it is on.

A test key reports from any host, your own machine included. Its hits are counted and listed on the Tracking screen and never become figures, so a site can be checked before it is live.

Trying it on your own machine

Put a test key (pk_test_...) in data-site while you build. The script sends from localhost with a test key and with no other, and the Tracking screen lists the latest 20 hits for 24 hours, each as it would have been recorded: the website and the page, whether it counted as a page view or as a named event, the referring host, the utm_* tags that were kept, and the device, browser and system. A name you have not declared is listed as the page view it counted as, with the name that was sent beside it.

Nothing a test key sends reaches Traffic. It counts against the month's events like any other hit, and a browser that asks not to be tracked sends nothing with a test key either.

Named events

Something worth counting that is not a page, such as a booking made, is an event:

backendfree.event('booking_made');

Declare the name on the Tracking screen first. A name that is not declared is recorded as the page view it also was, so a typo stops counting rather than failing.

Goals

An event, or a page, can be named as a goal from the Traffic screen: the thing you hope a visit ends in. Traffic then says what share of visits reached one, and how many of each source's visits did. A visit counts once for a goal, however often it got there, and is credited to where it first came from, so a visit that left to pay and came back still belongs to the search or the link that brought it. An event has to be declared before it can be a goal.

Pages that change without a reload

A single-page app changes the address without loading a page, and the script counts each change as a page view, once: the same address twice in a row is not a second view.

What it does not count

Nothing is sent from a visitor whose browser asks not to be tracked (Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track). With a live key, nothing is sent either from a page opened as a file, or from localhost, 127.0.0.1, [::1], ::1, or a host ending in .local. A site's first figures would otherwise be its builder, so on your own machine a live key sends nothing at all, by design. A test key does, as above.

A browser driven by a program, such as headless Chrome under Playwright or Puppeteer, says so in its User-Agent and is counted as a crawler, never as a visitor: with a live key it appears in the crawler figures, and with a test key it is not counted at all. A test checking that your page views arrive should give its browser an ordinary User-Agent.

Or from your own server

@backendfree/webanalytics reports the same page views from your server, which also sees crawlers and visitors without JavaScript. Use one or the other for a page, not both: both would count the same view.