Most analytics tools, including Owl Analytics, track information about individual visitors to your site.
Owl Analytics uses four methods to track unique visitors and their behaviors in your site:
- Visits log
- Visitor profiles
- Tracking cookies
- Reader email/username: Only used if you turn on Reader tracking in KB settings > Owl Analytics.
Review the information below with a security or compliance expert in your organization to determine which settings you should use.
Visits log
The Owl Analytics visits log can track details about visits to your knowledge base, including:
- Visitors' IP address and device details
- Visitors' location, based on their IP address
- The date and time of their visit
- The actions they completed during their visit
- How long they spent on different pages during their visit
This information is displayed in the Logs report.
Turn off this tracking
If you Turn off visits log & visitor profiles, this information won't be tracked and you won't have access to the Logs report.
Visitor profiles
The Owl Analytics visitor profiles can track details about your visitors, including their:
- Geolocation: City and country, based on IP address
- Browser
- Operating system
- Screen/device size
- Devices
- Full visits log, including first and last visit
- Summary of total time spent in your knowledge base,
Turn off this tracking
If you Turn off visits log & visitor profiles or if you Turn off visitor profiles, no visitor profile information will display. If you Turn off visitor profiles only, some device and geolocation details used by the visits log will still be tracked for the Logs report.
Tracking cookies
Owl Analytics sets four first-party tracking cookies:
- A visitor ID tracking cookie: A random ID we generate to identify unique visitors. This cookie is stored in visitors' browsers so we can separate unique visitors and identify repeat/returning visitors.
- A reference tracking cookie to identify where the visitors came from: This helps identify entry pages and navigation paths.
- Two session tracking cookies:
- One to flag the session as being tracked on the entry page.
- If the visitor completes an action after entering your knowledge base, we generate a random session ID to track their subsequent actions over the duration of the visit.
These first-party cookies do not require any explicit user consent for your knowledge base readers.
Suggested settings
If your privacy rules don't allow cookies, turn off the Tracking cookies toggle.
If you have no restrictions on using cookies, leave this toggle on for the most detailed information.
Reader email/username
If you turn on Reader tracking in KB settings > Analytics, KnowledgeOwl will share your logged-in-reader's email/username with Owl Analytics. This ties all visits logs and visitor profiles to that reader's email address.
