Configuring Privacy Settings In FunnelFuel

Include a Web Analytics Opt-Out feature on your website

On your website, in your existing privacy policy page or in the ‘Legal’ page, you can actually add a way for your visitors to “opt-out” of being tracked by your FunnelFuel server. By default, all of your website visitors are tracked, but if they opt-out by clicking on the opt-out checkbox, a cookie ‘FF-Ignore’ will be set. All visitors with a FF-Ignore cookie will not be tracked.

In Administration > Privacy > Users opt-out, you will be able to copy and paste the opt-out form code

Respect DoNotTrack preference

Do Not Track is a technology and policy proposal that enables users to opt-out of tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms. By default, FunnelFuel respects users preferences and will not track visitors who have specified “I do not want to be tracked” in their web browsers. For more information about DoNotTrack, check out donottrack.us.

In Administration > Privacy > Users opt-out, under “Support Do Not Track preference” you can enable/disable Do Not Track support:

Create a Privacy Policy page on your website(s)

A privacy policy is a statement or a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client’s data. It fulfills a legal requirement to protect a customer or client’s privacy.

When you use FunnelFuel to track your visitors, we recommend updating your Privacy Policy to explain how FunnelFuel is used and what data it gathers. We provide a Privacy Policy template here for FunnelFuel users that you can copy on your site.

Learn more about a GDPR compatible privacy policy in How to complete your privacy policy with FunnelFuel analytics under GDPR.

Learn about personal data regulations such as GDPR

To learn more about the privacy regulations and in particular the GDPR, we have put together a FunnelFuel GDPR guide.

In FunnelFuel go to Administration > Privacy > GDPR Overview to find details about awareness & documentation, individuals’ rights, security procedures, and data retention.

Anonymising data that has already been tracked

When you have tracked data in the past and realised later you tracked maybe too much data or some personal data, you can easily anonymize the affected data using our tool to anonymize previously tracked raw data.

As part of privacy legislation worldwide including GDPR but also ePrivacy, it is often required to display a cookie banner informing users about cookies, or consent must be obtained before tracking visitors’ personal data. However there is a solution available: you can use FunnelFuel Analytics without needing consent and without a cookie banner, by following all the steps listed below;

How do I use FunnelFuel Analytics without consent or cookie banner?

As part of privacy legislation worldwide including GDPR, CCPA, PECR, and ePrivacy, it is often required to display a cookie banner informing users about cookies, or consent must be obtained before tracking visitors’ data.

However there is a solution available: you can use FunnelFuel Analytics without needing consent and without a cookie banner, by following all the steps below.

To avoid the analytics cookie consent banner, follow the steps below:

  1. Enable cookie-less tracking: This is currently supported via your FunnelFuel account manager
  2. Easily let users opt-out
  3. Mention FunnelFuel in your Privacy Policy (see below).

No cookie consent is needed because:

  • tracking cookies are not used
  • the data is not used for any other purpose than analytics (compared to GA which uses it for other purposes and therefore always requires consent)
  • visitors aren’t tracked across websites (compared to GA which does track visitors across many websites)
  • a user cannot be tracked across days within the same website (no user profiles can be generated when cookies are disabled)

To not have to ask your visitors for consent (including the analytics cookie consent banner), then you need to make sure you do not track any personal data at all.

Follow these steps:

  • Make sure you disabled analytics tracking cookies (see section above).
  • Make sure IP addresses are anonymised (2 or 3 bytes) because the full IP address is considered personal data. By default this is the case with FunnelFuel analytics
  • Make sure your Page URLs and Page titles should not include personal data/PII (such as the visitor’s name).
  • Make sure your Page Referrers URLs do not include personal data (we’ll be soon working on a new feature for this).
  • If you use features like Custom Dimensions, Custom variables, Event tracking, make sure the data you collect does not include personal data/PII.
  • If you use features such as Session Recording or Heatmap, you need to ensure you ignore any element in the page that includes personal data, so that any personal data are not tracked
  • Make sure the data collected in FunnelFuel is used only for the audience measurement and evaluation of the website performance and not other purposes. This precludes you from running marketing campaigns using the data collected, meaning that for the vast majority of customers, you will require cookie consent. 
  • Make sure you are only tracking users on a single site and not tracking the same user across different websites.

All data you collect in FunnelFuel without user consent should be anonymous

You must also 1) easily let users opt-out and 2) mention FunnelFuel in your Privacy Policy (see below).

Let users opt-out

You must offer your users an easy way to opt-out from data collection, and include the opt-out form in a easy to access and visible page on your website, for example in your Privacy policy.

Mention analytics in your Privacy policy

We provide a copy and paste template to guide you here

Can I use FunnelFuel and Google Analytics / Yahoo! Analytics / WebTrends etc. at the same time?

Yes, you can use any combination of analytics packages at the same time on your pages. The downside is that your pages might take longer to load as each analytics Javascript tracking code will add some delay to the page load. We also recommend putting the FunnelFuel Tracking code immediately before the closing </head> tag.

Getting Started: What Does FunnelFuel Analytics Track?

Get started with FunnelFuel Analytics by learning the key concepts, how to use FunnelFuel, and useful How-to guides, including how to migrate from Google Analytics.

What data does FunnelFuel track?

When you use the FunnelFuel tracker, we will by default track the following information:

  • User IP address (see also: IP anonymisation below)
  • Optional User ID
  • Date and time of the request
  • Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
  • URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
  • URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
  • Screen resolution being used
  • Time in local user’s timezone
  • Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
  • Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
  • Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user: Page speed)
  • Location of the user: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
  • Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
  • User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header)

From the User-Agent, we use our Universal Device Detection library to detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.

Some information is also stored in first party cookies and then collected by FunnelFuel: we use this primarily for caching data and for speeding up the UI instead of using cookies as a primary data storage method.

  • Random unique Visitor ID
  • Time of the first visit for this user
  • Time of the previous visit for this user
  • Number of visits for this user

(Note: it is possible to disable tracking cookies)

Data that may be tracked (optional)

You may also configure FunnelFuel to track optional information about your users or how they are using your website and apps:

  • Custom Dimensions
  • Custom Variables
  • Campaigns
  • Site Search
  • Goals
  • Events
  • Viewing and clicking on Content
  • Mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls
  • Form interactions
  • Video and audio interactions

Data tracked which may be personal data or Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Some data tracked by FunnelFuel can be personal, private, sensitive and/or confidential.

The following information may contain such personal data, depending on what pages you track and what data is being collected (see also: how not to process any personal data):

  • IP Address is considered personal data, unless you have enabled the IP anonimisation to at least 2 bytes.
  • User ID may be personal data (you may also activate the privacy feature to replace each User ID with a pseudonym).
  • Custom dimensions and Custom variables may store personal data.
  • Site searches (on your website) may be personal data (for example when users search for their name or postcode on your website search engine).
  • Both Heatmap pages and Session Recordings, may contain personal data (for example, a Profile page on a social media website would include the name and photo of the user which would be recorded in the Heatmap and/or the Session Recording). If you want to not track these data, then you can specifically discard tracking them by using our mask attribute on these page elements containing personal data. For most B2B publishers and advertisers this is less of a concern, but also be wary of web forms / CPL forms which will contain PII - but see below
  • In Session recordings, please note that by default all form fields values are automatically discarded and not tracked. To track form field values in Session Recordings, you would need to manually mark the form fields to track with our data unmask attribute
  • Both Page URLs and Page titles and Custom Events may contain personal data depending on how your website(s) are designed (for example when the Page URL or URL parameters include email, postcode, name, or a physical address).
  • Referrer URLs may contain personal data (for example when your users come from another website which leaks your visitor’s personal data in their page URLs).
  • Tracking cookies IDs may (or may not) be considered personal data, and can be disabled.
  • Geolocation is based on the IP address and may be considered personal data.

How do I Migrate To FunnelFuel Analytics From GA

How do I migrate from Google Analytics and import all data in FunnelFuel?

The Google Analytics importer allows you to easily import all your historical web analytics reports from GA into FunnelFuel.

Plan your migration from Google Analytics to FunnelFuel

It is important to plan your migration from Google Analytics as it impacts the way you can view your historical data alongside the data you track in FunnelFuel. The most common use case is to import your Google Analytics data to the same “website” in FunnelFuel that you will be tracking with FunnelFuel. Another approach is to import your Google Analytics data to its own website in FunnelFuel, and track future data to a separate website.

Importing and tracking to the same website in FunnelFuel

If you want to import to the same website that you are tracking to, you need to run the GA import before adding the tracking code to your site. When you start a GA import in FunnelFuel, a new website will be automatically created within FunnelFuel for the imported data. The import cannot go into an existing website in FunnelFuel, and it cannot be merged later. For example, if you have been testing FunnelFuel and tracking your website into a website already, then this data can’t be merged with the imported data from Google Analytics (which will be in a newly created website). A GA import takes several days to complete.

Importing as a backup of your GA reports

It can be useful to import your GA reports into a separate website in FunnelFuel from the one you are tracking to. This means you can setup tracking first, and have a GA import running in the background to store your historical GA data. The GA Importer requires no special steps to support this use case. You can simply set up your import, which will create a separate website in FunnelFuel and import data to it. You can use any other existing or new website in FunnelFuel to track new data to.

  1. Setup Google Analytics import in FunnelFuel
    Follow the steps in the “Setting up the Google Analytics import” to get started. This authorizes your FunnelFuel install to access your Google Analytics data.
  2. Schedule the Google Analytics import to run
    This step is covered in full in “Running the Google Analytics import”.
  3. Embed the FunnelFuel tracking code into your website
    Now that the new website has been created for the import, then you can use the FunnelFuel JavaScript tracking code for this newly created website.
  4. Check that your website is now tracked in FunnelFuel correctly
    Check you can see your own visits and other visitors in real-time (if you are not seeing data, use this faq).
  5. Update the Import Job and set the “End Date” to today’s date
    Then the data will stop importing now that you are tracking the data in FunnelFuel directly. If you don’t do this step, the data will keep importing from GA and may cause conflicts with the data now being tracked in FunnelFuel.

Congratulations for migrating your Google Analytics data, and gaining full control over your data!

Finish setting up FunnelFuel

  1. Double check that you have implemented FunnelFuel tracking correctly
    Are all your Goals conversions still working and tracking data as expected? Are your custom dimensions also tracking as expected?
  2. Import your Search Engine Keywords – so you can view in FunnelFuel all your search engines keywords.

Working with the other Google products

  • If you run paid Google Ads, FunnelFuel will measure the performance of each ad and ad group and how they help convert visitors and the ROI (Return on investment) for your ad spends.
  • If you use Google Tag Manager, you can implement FunnelFuel using this but also consider migrating to the FunnelFuel tag manager, which is a direct competitor to Google Tag Manager
  • If you use Data Studio, you can import FunnelFuel reports and KPI metrics in Data Studio.
  • If you use BigQuery to import your users’ RAW data, you may use the FunnelFuel database to export all RAW data from FunnelFuel to BigQuery (or any other data warehouse).
  • If you run your A/B test experiments with Google Optimize, you would instead start using the FunnelFuel built-in A/B tests functionality to create and manage and run your A/B tests and measure the success metrics and learn which version of your page works better.

Final steps to remove Google Analytics

Once you’ve confirmed that everything is reported as expected in FunnelFuel:

  1. You may remove your Google Analytics tracking codes from your website. This will stop the collection of your visitors data by Google as well as slightly increase the page load speed.
  2. (Optional) after a few months or a year, once you’ve confident about using FunnelFuel, you may also delete the property from your Google Analytics account.
  3. (Optional) once you have migrated all your properties to FunnelFuel, you may also delete your Google Analytics account.

Thank you for taking these steps towards more privacy and take control of your data.