Documentation

Start here

If you have five minutes and a website, the whole product is one script tag. Install the script walks through it, shows you how to prove it is working, and covers the three situations that are not quite one tag: single-page apps, tag managers, and a content security policy that blocks third-party scripts.

Everything after that is optional. You get pageviews, referrers, countries, devices and realtime visitors without configuring anything at all.

All pages

What you can check for yourself

The privacy guarantee is stated on every page it applies to. No cookies. No localStorage identity. No IP address stored anywhere. A one-way visitor hash that rotates daily and cannot be reversed, joined across days, or joined across sites.

None of that has to be taken on trust. Open the network and storage panels in your own browser on a page carrying the script, and you can see the whole of what it sends and the whole of what it stores on the device, which is nothing. Wherever a claim on these pages needs proof, it points you at something you can watch happen.

What you will not find here is how any of it is built: the storage design, the shape of the counting, the construction of the hash. You need none of it to use the product or to satisfy yourself about the privacy claims.

Known gaps, stated up front

Three things people look for here and do not find, so nobody wastes an afternoon:

• There is no self-hosted build, and none is planned. The collector and the dashboard run on our infrastructure. If running the server yourself is a requirement, we are the wrong product, and it is better to know that now than three weeks in. If what you want is to get off Google Analytics onto something hosted but private, start with the Google Analytics migration guide.
• The Stats API is on the Business tier. So are ecommerce revenue metrics and breakdowns by custom property. If querying your own data is the reason you are here, that is the plan you need — the Stats API reference says so on its first screen, not after you have written the integration.
• The script does not honour Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, and does not pretend to. What it has instead is a real opt-out you can wire to a control your visitors can see — see the visitor opt-out.

Something missing?

If something on these pages does not match what you are seeing, that is a bug in the documentation and we would like to hear about it. The privacy policy carries the address to write to.