Cookieless mode

In cookieless mode Virling sets no cookie and stores nothing in the browser. Visitors are counted with a hash instead.

Turn it on

Do both:

1. In the app, open your site’s settings and turn on Cookieless mode. The server then ignores any visitor ID the browser sends.
2. Add data-cookieless to the script tag, so the virling_vid cookie is never set:

<script defer src="https://stats.example.com/v.js"
  data-site="yourdomain.com" data-cookieless></script>

The settings page shows the tag with the attribute added.

How visitors are counted

Each event gets a visitor ID made from a hash of the site, the IP address and the user agent, with a random salt. The salt lives only in memory. It changes every day at midnight UTC, and on a server restart, and the old one is never stored. The IP address itself is not stored.

The same salted hash is also used for any event that arrives without a valid visitor ID, for example from a browser that blocks cookies.

What you give up

Warning

Payments become Unattributed. Without a visitor ID there is nothing to pass into checkout, so new payments cannot be linked to a visit. They still count toward revenue, as Unattributed.

• A returning visitor counts as a new visitor each day.
• Two people behind the same IP address with the same browser version count as one.
• Sessions still work, since they only need 30 minutes of continuity.

Payments imported before you switched keep the attribution they already had.

When to use it

Use it when you would rather not ask for cookie consent and revenue attribution does not matter for that site. See Privacy and consent.