How Silktide Analytics works

Big tech tracks your every move online. Under GDPR, it’s illegal for personally identifiable information to be sent outside the EU. But Google’s servers are located in the US, so by using Google Analytics you could be breaking the law. Not just this, but Google also tracks user data, building a profile of online activity online. That profile is used to send targeted ads to users whichever website they visit. All this is made possible by the use of third-party cookies. Eliminate cookies, and you can help to eliminate user tracking online and create a more privacy-focused Internet.

No. Silktide Analytics is designed to ignore or forget all of the following: IP address, User agent, Precise location (we only remember country + region, e.g., US state), Query parameters (except where the customer has explicitly indicated a parameter is safe), Form data.

No. Cookies are not required. This means you can ditch your cookie popup banner, which is intrusive and has made the web worse for everybody.

We take the IP address and browser of a visitor, and we do some math with it to combine those into a magic number that changes every 24 hours. We immediately forget the IP address and browser and this information is never ever stored.

The magic number is designed so that it’s impossible for us to turn it back into the IP address. And it’s designed so it changes every 24 hours in a way that we can never reverse it. This lets us do many of the things you want from an analytics solution, like count unique visitors, and identify entrance and exit pages.

But it also means that even if you had access to all of Silktide’s data, none of it could be used to identify anyone.

Potentially. If you only use Google Analytics, then you could remove that script, implement Silktide Analytics, and you wouldn’t need a cookie popup anymore. Most people will use many third-party cookies (Facebook, Twitter, live chat widgets, etc.), so you’d have to remove those before removing your cookie popup.

Yes. You can create a single analytics “property” and share it over multiple domains.

Heatmaps are available for every page on your website, without any configuration from you, within the Silktide Inspector. Heatmaps include click data, scroll percentages, abandonment, and user frustration events. See user activity on every page of your website that’s tested by Silktide, on both mobile and desktop.

Silktide Analytics is an optional addition to the Silktide web governance platform. It’s not available as a standalone product at the moment. Our platform helps large global organizations, governments, healthcare providers, and educational establishments improve their websites by finding and fixing common problems. Pricing depends on the number of annual visitors to your site and is in addition to the Silktide platform pricing. Talk to us for a quotation for your organization.

Yes. Silktide Analytics is compliant with all global privacy laws, including CCPA. No personally identifiable user data is stored, and no cookies are set.

No. By design, we do not store anything that could be used to identify individuals, e.g. IP address, cookie, email address, query parameter, form entries, or User ID.
This applies even if the user is logged in to your website. Some analytics platforms are designed to store logged-in visitor behavior. Silktide is deliberately designed to not do this.

Yes. By default, Silktide can only identify someone if they return within a 24-hour window of their last visit. This helps ensure our high standards for visitor privacy.

Our identifier combines the IP address and User Agent, which is a piece of text provided by your browser that indicates the browser version, operating system, and more. If both of those are the same at the same time, Silktide would see a visitor as the same person.

Yes, if you’re viewing the page inside a table you can click on the grey filter button to do this. Or you can type the URL in, using the “Filter” button, then “Page” at the top-right of the screen.

Yes. Our IP addresses are anonymized in a way that means they change every 24 hours. So we couldn’t even tell if someone was a repeat visitor after 24 hours, even if we wanted to. This is important because other solutions which use anonymized IP addresses could still be tied back to an individual IP. With Silktide this isn’t possible.

Yes, Silktide Analytics tracks downloads by default.
Most analytics solutions – e.g. Google Analytics – require you to add extra code or configuration to achieve this. We’ve built it into Silktide as standard, with no configuration required.

Yes, Silktide Analytics tracks external links by default. Most analytics solutions – e.g. Google Analytics – require you to add extra code or configuration to achieve this. We’ve built it into Silktide Analytics as standard – no configuration required.

Silktide Analytics records all visitor data, but when showing aggregate values we sometimes use samples. For example, say a website had received 10 million views during a period, and you were applying complex filters for location, browser, and so on. Checking all 10 million views could result in unacceptable slow performance, so in such cases, Silktide Analytics might use a smaller sample and extrapolate from that. These samples are large enough that any error is almost guaranteed to be <0.5%.

There is no limit, so long as you remain a paying customer.

When we receive an event from a visitor, we use their IP address to look up their country and region, and then we immediately forget their IP address and only store these two pieces of information. This means that we never know the specific location of a visitor (e.g. their city, or street), and only store the broad location so it can be reported on in aggregate. We don’t believe analytics has any morally defensible need to store more accurate geographic data on visitors than this.

Yes. All of our regular analytics work in the same way whether on a public website or a private intranet. Heatmaps aren’t possible for private pages by default – this is true for all heatmaps solutions, not just Silktide. Generally, unless Silktide can “see” a page itself, it can’t show the page to put a heatmap over it.

Yes, all analytics data is encrypted “at rest” (i.e. when stored), and also “in flight” (when being sent between computers, e.g. from Silktide to you over our web interface).

There’s a very simple setup process that takes about a minute. Silktide gives you a snippet of JavaScript code to copy into your website. This is the same requirement for all web analytics platforms, so if you’re using any analytics already, you’ve already done this before.

We don’t use any cookies or other persistent identifiers. We don’t record any Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We keep all your data in the EU (or if you prefer, in the US). There is no way to identify any individual. There is no way to identify if a visitor to one website views another website (unless both websites are owned by the same organization, and they choose to enable this). There is no way to identify a visitor to a website is returning to the same website, after 24 hours have passed. We collect the bare minimum of data required to provide aggregate statistics about visitors. All our data is encrypted.

Frustration is when a visitor does something that suggests they are frustrated with your web page. What we do is remember when a visitor clicks or taps on something, and nothing happens for a few seconds.
For example, say you try to fill in a form and press the “submit” button, and it doesn’t do anything. No errors, no loading messages, just nothing. That’s frustration.
What we often see is people clicking on things they expect to be clickable, like headings, or images, and getting frustrated when that doesn’t do anything. This often tells you where you’re missing something important that they want, and you can take action to fix it.