Scoby Analytics

<p>Scoby Analytics is a privacy-focused analytics plugin for WordPress. It is designed to provide website operators with actionable usage statistics <strong>without using cookies, device fingerprinting, or cross-site identifiers</strong>.</p>
<p>The WordPress integration is a <strong>lightweight, client-side integration</strong> that prioritizes visitor privacy. Scoby’s goal is to enable analytics in a way that can typically be operated under <strong>legitimate interest</strong> (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) and <strong>without consent banners</strong>, provided it is used as intended and configured appropriately. Scoby does not provide legal advice; always assess your specific setup with your DPO/legal counsel. We’re happy to answer their questions at <a href="mailto:hello@scoby.io" rel="nofollow ugc">hello@scoby.io</a></p>
<h3>Privacy approach (GDPR / ePrivacy)</h3>
<p>Scoby is designed around the following principles:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>No cookies / no storage on the user device</strong> (relevant for ePrivacy / TDDDG)</li>
<li><strong>No device fingerprinting</strong></li>
<li><strong>No user profiles or cross-site tracking</strong></li>
<li><strong>Anonymization before transmission</strong> and <strong>aggregated storage</strong> (no individual-level analytics)</li>
</ul>
<p>This means Scoby is not trying to “optimize consent rates”. Instead, it aims to reduce or avoid regulated processing operations in the first place by keeping analytics <strong>non-identifying</strong> and <strong>aggregate</strong>.</p>
<h3>What Scoby measures</h3>
<p>Scoby provides aggregated statistics such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Page views and visits</li>
<li>Entry/exit pages and content performance</li>
<li>Engagement metrics (e.g., time-spent distributions/percentiles)</li>
<li>Conversion events (depending on your setup)</li>
<li>Referrers and traffic sources (without persistent identifiers)</li>
</ul>
<h3>What Scoby does not do</h3>
<ul>
<li>No cookies</li>
<li>No device fingerprinting</li>
<li>No cross-site tracking</li>
<li>No user/device profiles</li>
</ul>
<h3>Reporting & exports</h3>
<ul>
<li>WordPress dashboard reporting</li>
<li>Export to <code>.xlsx</code></li>
<li>Integrations with BI tools (e.g., Looker Studio, PowerBI, Tableau)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Third Party Services</h3>
<p>Scoby Analytics uses Scoby-operated servers for analytics processing.</p>
<h3>Service Used</h3>
<p><strong>Service:</strong> Scoby Analytics Servers<br />
<strong>Purpose:</strong> Capture, process, and store website usage statistics in an anonymized and aggregated form to provide analytics reporting.</p>
<h3>Data Handling and Privacy</h3>
<p>– <strong>Anonymization prior to transmission:</strong> Page views and associated metrics are anonymized before being transmitted to Scoby Analytics servers.<br />
– <strong>Aggregation:</strong> Stored data is aggregated and not intended to relate to identifiable individuals.<br />
– <strong>No personal identifiers:</strong> Scoby is designed to avoid collecting or storing identifiers such as cookies, fingerprinting signals, or IP addresses.</p>
<h3>Transparency and further information</h3>
<p>– Service information: https://www.scoby.io/<br />
– Terms of Use: https://www.scoby.io/terms<br />
– Privacy Policy: https://www.scoby.io/privacy</p>


Privacy-focused analytics for WordPress — designed to minimize data protection risk under EU GDPR and ePrivacy.

BoUk

<p>There are deffinitely different methods for implementing pageview counters. Considering some external service such as <a href="https://jetpack.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Jetpack</a> or <a href="https://analytics.google.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Google Analytics</a> is surely a good option, but there may be scenarios where you may want to handle this just by yourself and have everything more under control.</p>
<p>Since it’s very common to utilize some caching mechanism to improve your site’s performance, implementing counter directly on PHP level wouldn’t work reliably as counter would be barely incremeneted due to the caching. Better solution would be to use WordPress way of triggering AJAX requests and increment pageview counters anytime page is loaded, no matter if served from cache or not.</p>
<p>When we start to think on bigger scale though, we find tradional WP AJAX implementation quite resources heavy as well. This plugin uses slightly more complicated method to increase counters, but it’s very lightweight. In a nuthsell, counters are stored ‘outside’ of WordPress ecosystem into some fast storage such as Memcached or Redis. Then there’s implemented re-occuring cron task on WordPress level, which regularly checks for new counters and store its values as postmeta for each respective post.</p>
<p>Plugin utilizes <a href="https://www.phpfastcache.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">PhpFastCache library</a> which allows to store data into many types of back-ends. See their <a href="https://github.com/PHPSocialNetwork/phpfastcache/blob/master/docs/DRIVERS.md" rel="nofollow ugc">documentation</a> for more details. This feature allows you to choose any back-end depending on your hosting provider.</p>
<p>This plugin comes preconfigured with file-based storage, which should work on any hosting environment, but for higher traffic sites you may want to consider in-memory storage such as MemcacheD.</p>
<p>Whole principle and idea is described in following <a href="https://www.bouk.info/efficient-handling-of-ajax-requests-on-wordpress-platform/" rel="nofollow ugc">article</a> published on my blog.</p>


PageViews Counter

Implement your own pageviews counter in efficient way, using different backend storages such as MemcacheD or Redis.

Scoby Analytics vs PageViews Counter