How does HockeyStack track users?
HockeyStack’s automatic tracking is not magic, although it certainly feels like that. In this article, you can learn how we track users without using cookies while being GDPR compliant.
HockeyStack’s automatic tracking is not magic, although it certainly feels like that. What you add to your website is basically a script file hosted through a CDN network, like any other third-party app.
But what separates HockeyStack from the other analytics tools is that it listens to all events registered on your website through DOM event listeners so that it can track clicks, submissions, and searches, as well as pageviews. Not only the events, but HockeyStack can also automatically track certain event properties like the text content of buttons, URLs of links, and the searched values.
To enrich your data, you can identify your customers through a simple one-line method bound to the global HockeyStack object on your website, or send your own custom events to add additional properties to actions and users
The tracking script at the time of this writing is about 9.11 kilobytes. Although byte size definitely matters, an addition of this small magnitude would not affect your site speed at all.
About GDPR
HockeyStack stores all data in the EU, and you can send us an email at hello@hockeystack.com for the DPA.
Also, all users have an option to clear their data whenever they want.
How Does Cookieless Tracking Work?
In this day and age, opting out of cookies has become the default and tracking tools switching to cookie-less alternatives has become the fashion. Thankfully, the HockeyStack team follows the fashion trends.
The HockeyStack snippet that you receive when you sign up by default is modified for cookieless tracking:
<script async data-apikey="YOUR_API_KEY" data-cookieless src="<https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hockeystack@latest/hockeystack.min.js>"></script>
The data-cookieless attribute runs the script under cookieless tracking and removing that would automatically switch you to cookie-based tracking.
But then, how do you track unique visitors?
Although we can’t disclose all the details, we use a fingerprint generated at the server and hashed using the SHA256 algorithm with a unique salt so that it would be impossible to obtain the original data from the fingerprint.
To create this fingerprint, we use data such as but not limited to:
- Device type
- Screen height, width, and depth
- Browser
- OS
- Browser language
- Browser version
- Plugins installed
- Extensions
- Country and city data
- Timezone
- The API key of the customer
All this data is gathered through the browser, and its variety ensures that the fingerprint created is as unique as possible.
ec5d7eb1-4c2b-4da0-a214-c7059f1fa9e6 This is an example user id that I’ve copied from our own dashboard. As you can see, it is impossible to decrypt but gives you an opportunity to record unique traffic.
FAQ
Does HockeyStack slow down website loading speed?
No, not at all as the script is pretty small.
Can HockeyStack track users across subdomains?
Yes, it can track users across subdomains. You can add a subdomain to your account in Settings.
Where does HockeyStack store its data?
In Frankfurt, Germany.
Odin automatically answers mission critical questions for marketing teams, builds reports from text, and sends weekly emails with insights.
You can ask Odin to find out the top performing campaigns for enterprise pipeline, which content type you should create more next quarter, or to prepare your doc for your next board meeting.
Nova does account scoring using buyer journeys, helps automate account research, and builds workflows to automate tasks.
For example, you can ask Nova to find high intent website visitors that recently hired a new CMO, do research to find if they have a specific technology on their website, and add them to the right sequence.
Our customers are already managing over $20B in campaign spend through the HockeyStack platform. This funding will allow us to expand our product offerings, and continue to help B2B companies scale revenue with AI-based insight products that make revenue optimization even easier.
We are super excited to bring more products to market this year, while helping B2B marketing and sales teams continue driving efficient growth.
A big thank you to all of our team, investors, customers, and friends. Without your support, we couldn’t have grown this fast.
Reach out if you want to learn more about our new products and check out HockeyStack!
About HockeyStack
HockeyStack is the Revenue Acceleration Platform for B2B. HockeyStack integrates with a company’s CRM, marketing automation tools, ad platforms and data warehouse to reveal the ideal customer journey and provide actionable next steps for marketing and sales teams. HockeyStack customers use this data to measure channel performance, launch cost-efficient campaigns, and prioritize the right accounts.
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has more than $18 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).
