Tracking anonymous users

Tracking anonymous readers tells you what people look at before they contact you. Useful, and it needs saying in your privacy notice.

Tracking anonymous readers tells you what people look at before they contact you. Useful, and it needs saying in your privacy notice.

The setting

1. Open Knowledge from the product tray, then Settings.
2. Enable anonymous user tracking.
3. Save.

What it gives you

Article views and searches from visitors who are not signed in, which on a public help centre is most of them. Without it your figures cover only the minority who signed in.

That matters for the two reports worth running: what nobody reads, and what people searched for and did not find.

What it does not do

It does not identify anybody. It counts visits and searches; it does not tell you who read what.

Say so

Any tracking belongs in your privacy notice, and in your cookie banner where you have one. That is not an argument against doing it; it is a step in doing it properly.

Worth checking with whoever owns your privacy notice rather than assuming the existing wording covers it.

The consent interaction

Where your cookie tooling blocks scripts until somebody accepts, your figures cover only visitors who accepted. That is correct behaviour and it means your numbers understate reality, which is useful to know before drawing conclusions from them.

See also

• Finding searches that return nothing
• Which knowledge base numbers matter
• Complying with privacy law in your Help Center