Introduction

tracing.tools is web analytics for products that sell something. It answers the two questions a dashboard usually splits in half — where did the traffic come from and where did the money come from — on the same screen, under the same filters.

It is built around three decisions.

Cookieless by construction

There is no analytics cookie, no local-storage id, no fingerprint, and nothing in the browser that survives a page. A visitor is identified server-side, by a SHA-256 hash of:

UTC day | rotating salt | IP address | user agent | site public key

The hash is truncated to 16 bytes and written instead of the IP. It cannot be reversed, it is different on every site, and it is different tomorrow. Nothing links a visitor across two days or two sites.

That is the whole identity system, and it is what makes the default install work without a consent banner in most jurisdictions — but it also sets a hard limit on what can be measured. Retention across days, lifetime value and month-long funnels do not work from a rotating id. Where that matters, the product says so on the screen rather than quietly printing a wrong number.

What a daily id costs you

Everything that needs to recognise the same person tomorrow needs tracing.identify(). See How visitors are counted for the exact consequences per screen.

One script, no snippet maintenance

A single tag installs everything: pageviews, single-page-app route changes, outbound link clicks, time on page, custom events, revenue events and traits.

<script defer
  data-site="pk_live_xxxxxxxx"
  data-api="https://ingest.tracing.tools"
  src="https://ingest.tracing.tools/t.js"></script>

The tag never changes. Exclusions, timezone, currency and the public dashboard are settings on the site row, not edits to your HTML.

Revenue is an event

Send an amount with an event, from the page where the purchase completed, and it is credited to the visit it fired in: the source, the campaign, the landing page and the country come for free. There is nothing to connect and no id to forward.

tracing("purchase", { revenue: 49, currency: "USD" });

See Tracking revenue for the setup, and How attribution works for the one rule.

What you get

Overview and RealtimeVisitors, pageviews, visits, bounce rate, time on page and revenue, plus a live feed.

SessionsEvery visit as a row, with a drawer showing the whole timeline.

Events and propertiesAn explorer over custom events, their properties, values and histograms.

JourneysA flow diagram of where visitors go next — or where they came from.

PerformanceCore Web Vitals from real page loads: LCP, INP, CLS, FCP and TTFB at the 75th percentile.

Goals, funnels, retentionConversions, step-by-step drop-off and cohort grids.

RevenueRevenue, transactions, average order and customers, by source, page and audience.

AskA copilot grounded in the numbers the screen is already showing.

REST API and CSVThe same queries the dashboard runs, over HTTP.

Note

Events, Performance, Revenue, goals, funnels, retention and the REST API are on the Pro plan. Collection does not depend on the plan — the tracker records custom events, Core Web Vitals and revenue on Hobby too, so upgrading shows the history rather than starting it. See Plans & limits.

The pieces

Piece	What it is
Tracker	~6 KB of JavaScript served at /t.js, running in the visitor’s browser
Collector	Validates, enriches and writes hits, close to the visitor
Database	Sessions, events, properties, traits and vitals
Dashboard	The app at tracing.tools, and the HTTP API behind it

tracing.tools is a hosted service; all four are run for you.

Next

• Quickstart — create a site and verify the first hit.
• Installation guides — your framework or CMS.
• How visitors are counted — read this before trusting a number.