How I Collect Blog Statistics, Respectfully – Online Goddess

How I Collect Blog Statistics, Respectfully

12 Jul, 2026

Ever since I’ve had a website, I’ve been curious to know who is visiting it and what they do while they’re there. Am I posting into an empty space, or is somebody actually reading?

I don’t need (or desire) to write about the development and ethics of the analytics industry - we all know what Google is doing with our data. Instead I want to write about collecting data with respect for our readers. Because it is possible.

The biggest attraction to me is knowing what parts of my website people are viewing. This is easily done by simply logging the number of hits to a given page. Good old-fashioned raw access website logs can tell you this, though they aren’t always user-friendly and certainly not pretty1.

Critically, I don’t need to know who is viewing the page.

Other useful stats can still be collected ethically:

Referrers - very useful for knowing how people are finding your site.

Devices and Screen Resolutions - to help ensure your site design fits your audience.

And then there is data that simply satisfies curiosity, but can be a breach of privacy:

Location - always fascinating to know where readers come from, but not a necessary statistic and many people are understandably sensitive to this being collected.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) - any data that has potential to reveal the identity of an individual. Could be their IP address, a username or email for example. Definitely not cool to collect this info!

To me, collecting data should have two simple outcomes:

To give my audience the best experience viewing my website.

To build a picture of how people arrive at, and view my website, not who.

In addition to keeping things this simple, it’s important to ensure any data collected is kept somewhere safe. At this time, with GDPR being one of the most stringent forms of privacy legislation, most ethical analytics services are based in the EU or at least host their data there.

In my early days of running websites, I was blissfully unaware of the reasons companies like Google offered their services for free. In 2010, I switched to a paid service called Clicky, which did much the same thing but was more privacy-focussed. However, it does have some features which called that into question, like the ability to spy on users in real time (it is literally called Spy!) and it does collect IP addresses.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been using a German-based service called Pirsch. which I chose because it’s more feature-rich than others at the same price-point. I also use it for work and it’s been especially useful there, even helping identify issues that could have prevented my customers from purchasing anything or logging in. But I was also impressed but Pirsch’s attitude to privacy, complying not just with GDPR, but a whole host of other strict laws.

Pirsch gives you the website insights you need — page views, referrers, campaigns, and more — without cookies, without consent banners, and without ever touching your visitors’ personal data. Fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, PECR, and Schrems II, and built and hosted entirely in Germany under strict European privacy law.

Full privacy statement can be found here.

It pays to do a bit of research into analytics companies because buzzwords like EU-hosted and privacy-friendly don’t necessarily guarantee they can keep visitor data compliant with strict EU standards.

Some services will offer you fancy extras, like having custom domains for your dashboard, the ability to theme it, or API access to track very specific activity. For bloggers, this is definitely overkill, but I will admit I like to theme my dashboard!

I do have session-tracking in my setup. This shows the path a visitor took and information such as referrer, location and device info. Each session has a unique ID which expires after 24 hours. If the same person returns after that time, they are treated as a new visitor. Here’s an example:

I haven’t the faintest idea who this person is - is it their first visit or their 20th? I’m very happy to know they read my facts page though!

Analytics services don’t catch every visitor and there’s nothing you can do about that. If someone has JavaScript disabled, the Do Not Track option enabled, or 3rd party script blocking, they won’t be seen. Same goes with anyone using your RSS feed2. So you have to accept that the data you collect will not be representative of everyone that visits your site, but it’s still plenty enough to tell you what you need to know.

This was more of a deep-dive than I intended, but hope it has given some food for thought. With a little care, website owners can collect useful information that doesn’t invade visitor privacy.

And if you want to know exactly what I see, my Pirsch dashboard is publicly visible, so feel free to go on over and have a nose around.

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