Analytics Basics

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  Anonymous Visitor Tracking: What You Can and Cannot Know

  Anonymous visitor tracking records what visits do without tying them to a named person, and it is the default for almost all analytics. Anonymously you still learn how many came, from where, on what device, roughly where, and which pages, just not who. Cookieless tracking replaces the browser cookie with a first-party ID or a daily hash, which matters because Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default. The line between anonymous and identified tracking is consent, not capability.

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  How to Count Unique Visitors, and Why Tools Disagree

  A unique visitor is one browser counted once over a period. Google Analytics 4 has no metric called unique visitors; use Users, and Active users is the default count of unique users who engaged. New users are browsers seen for the first time. Two analytics tools never match because they filter bots differently (bots are now over half of all web traffic), identify returning visitors differently, draw time windows differently, and get blocked at different rates. Pick one tool and follow its trend.

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  What Does UTM Stand For? The Urchin Story

  UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin was a web analytics company that Google bought in 2005 and turned into Google Analytics. The company is long gone, but its initials survive on every tagged link and in Google Analytics' old tracking cookies. Knowing this mostly does one useful thing: it stops the letters looking technical, so you can focus on the part that actually matters, choosing a medium value Google recognises.

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  utm_source vs utm_medium vs utm_campaign vs utm_content

  Four UTM parameters, four jobs. utm_source is the specific place a click came from, like reddit. utm_medium is what kind of place that is, like social. utm_campaign is the push it belongs to, like launch_week. utm_content separates two links inside that same push. Three of the four are yours to name freely. Medium is the exception: Google matches it against a fixed list to decide which channel your visit belongs to, and an invented value quietly lands in a bucket called Unassigned.

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  What Are UTM Parameters? A Plain-English Guide

  A UTM parameter is a short label you add to the end of a link so your analytics can tell you where each visitor came from. The page they land on does not change. It matters because links shared in places like Slack, WhatsApp and Discord usually arrive with no source at all, so without a tag you cannot tell which community sent you the people who signed up. If you only ever use one label, use utm_source.