Koko Analytics – Tracking Without Privacy Concerns

Everyone who runs a website or even a blog would like to know if people are actually consuming their content. If you don’t want to go overboard and use a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll need to opt for one of the more minimalist solutions. Koko Analytics is one such option.

Compared to significantly more invasive tools, the data provided by Koko Analytics could be more detailed. For example, I can’t see that a visitor from Camden read this post here at 7:31 a.m., then moved on to yesterday’s post and finally exited from the homepage.

What I can see, however, is the number of views a specific piece of content has received and the websites from which visitors arrived. For most use cases, this information is entirely sufficient. After all, we usually want to know whether our content is noticed at all and, if so, which posts are particularly popular.

After installation, both the settings and the analytics generated by Koko Analytics can be found under the admin menu item Dashboard / Analytics. A widget is added to the dashboard, giving you a quick overview of your website’s statistics.

Since Koko Analytics refrains from tracking personal data, it should be usable in most cases without significant concerns about GDPR compliance. The developer of the plugin, Danny van Kooten, offers not only the free version available on WordPress.org but also a paid version.

Wasn’t there something else?

Those who know me know that I’m a member of the Pluginkollektiv, a group of people who maintain plugins like Statify. Statify is also a GDPR-compliant tracking plugin. And, of course, I should recommend our own plugin here, right?

Well, our work at Pluginkollektiv is entirely voluntary. So, I lose absolutely nothing by recommending Danny’s excellent plugin here. On the other hand, I believe there are aspects of Koko Analytics from which we could take inspiration for Statify. In the end, everyone benefits when more WordPress sites rely on privacy-friendly plugins like Koko Analytics and Statify.