Privatrak

Documentation

Set up Privatrak, name what matters to you and read every report.

Watch the video seriesEight short videos covering the whole product, on YouTube.Opens in a new tab

Getting started

Privatrak shows you how people use your website or app. A small script on your site records page views, clicks and form submissions, and your dashboard turns them into reports: where visitors come from, what they use and where they drop off. Here you add analytics to your website in four steps, from a new account to your first recorded page view.

Privatrak works without cookies and never reads what people type into forms. Privacy lists what it stores.

Before you start

  • An email address for your account, or a Google account.
  • Access to your site’s HTML, or a developer who can add one line to it.

1. Create your account

  1. Sign up with an email address and a password, or with Google.
  2. If you signed up with an email address, open the confirmation email and click its link. The link is valid for 24 hours.

Confirm your address before step 3, because creating a key needs a confirmed address. If the email doesn’t arrive, look in your spam folder, or click resend verification email in the notice on the Overview. With Google, your address is confirmed already.

2. Create your project

A project is one website or app. After you sign up, Privatrak asks where you want to start.

  1. Under Set up your own site, click Create a project.
  2. Enter a Project name.
  3. Under Where most of your visitors are, choose your visitors’ timezone. Your browser’s timezone is filled in, so change it if your visitors live somewhere else.
  4. Click Next through Auto-capture, Allowed domains and Privacy & security. The defaults suit most sites.
  5. Click Create project.

The timezone decides when a day starts in your reports, and Privatrak counts each visitor once per day in it. Choose it carefully now, because a later change applies to future days only. You can change everything else at any time under Settings.

Want to look around first? Under Look around a demo project, click Start the tour. You get a project with a month of sample data and a short tour of every report. The demo makes way for your own project as soon as you create one, and the start screen is the only place it is offered.

3. Add the analytics script tag to your website

  1. On the last screen, click Add the tracker to your site. Later you find the same page as Setup in the sidebar.
  2. Under Get an API Key, click Create API Key. Enter a Name and click Create key.
  3. Under Install the script tag, copy the script tag. Your key is already in it.
  4. Paste it into the <head> of every page you want to measure.
<script
  src="https://api.privatrak.com/tracker.js"
  data-api-key="your-website-key"
  defer
></script>

This is your website key. It belongs in your page, where anyone can read it, and it can only send data.

Is your site built with React, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt, Angular or SvelteKit? Install in your framework shows where the tag goes.

4. Check that it works

  1. Open your own site in your browser.
  2. In Privatrak, open Events.
  3. Click Refresh events, the button with circular arrows above the Event Log.

Your page view is the top row, with the type Pageview. It arrives within a few seconds. Privatrak then records page views, clicks and form submissions on every page with the tag.

If nothing arrives

  • Check that the script tag is in the <head> of the page you opened, with your key in it.
  • If you filled in Allowed domains, check that your site’s address is on the list under Settings › Privacy.
  • Open your browser’s developer console on your site. The tracker writes a message there when it can’t send.

Next steps

Getting started: add Privatrak analytics to your website