Documentation
Learn how to use the tracking tool
Getting Started
Five steps from an empty account to your first recorded visit, and doing them takes about as long as reading them. If you already have an account and a project, the Setup page does the last three with your own key already filled in — follow it there, and read this for the reasons behind it.
Watch the video seriesEight short videos covering the whole product, on YouTube.Opens in a new tab1. Create an account
Sign up with an email address and a password, or with Google. With an email address you are sent a link to confirm the address is yours, and it is good for a day. Click it before you reach step 3: no key can be created until the address is confirmed. If the mail is not in your inbox, look in the spam folder — and there is a button at the top of your dashboard that sends it again. Signing in with Google confirms the address for you, so there is nothing to click.
2. Create a project
A project is one website or app: its own keys, its own settings, its own numbers. Right after signing up you are offered two things. A guided tour opens a demo project already full of made-up data, which is the quickest way to see what the dashboard does before any of your own data exists; it sits alongside your real projects rather than mixing into them. Create your first project is the one to take here. It asks four short questions — what to call it, which interactions to record on their own, which domains may send data, and a few privacy settings — and every answer can be changed afterwards under Settings.
The one answer worth a moment's thought is the timezone, which is filled in from your browser. It decides where a day starts and ends for this project, and so which day every number lands on. Changing it later only affects days that have not happened yet, so it is cheaper to get right now. Settings has the detail.
3. Create a public API key
A public key is the one that belongs on your website, where anybody can read it. That is safe: it can send events in and read nothing back. Create one on the Setup page, or pick an existing one from the list.
4. Add the script to your pages
Put this in the <head> of every page you want to record, with your own key in place of the example. Keep the defer: it lets the browser finish building the page first, and it is what makes track() work from your own code straight away.
<script
src="https://api.privatrak.com/tracker.js"
data-api-key="your-public-key"
defer
></script>5. Check that it arrived
Open your own site once to produce a page view, then open the Events page and press refresh above the table. Your visit should be the top row within a few seconds. If nothing appears, open the browser console on your site: the tracker says out loud when a key is rejected or the site is not in the allowed domains.
What happens next
From here on, page views, clicks on the things people can click, and submitted forms are recorded without any further code. Give names to the parts of your product you care about with the Element Picker, which needs no code either. If your site is built with React, Next.js, Nuxt or similar, follow Framework Guides. Tracker Settings changes what is collected and how often, and Privacy & Security is where you restrict which sites may use your key at all.