Consent and visitor tracking

Where to find the setting

Open a site from Sites, choose Settings, and scroll to Visitor tracking and consent. The card holds two things: whether adfit measures this site at all, and how it recognizes visitors while it does.

Turn measurement on or off

The switch Measure visitors and conversions on this site controls everything below it. When it is off, adfit stops measuring on this site: no visitor data, no A/B results. Personalizations and pageview counting keep running.

• Turning it off ends every running experiment on the site. adfit asks you to confirm first.
• Turning it back on starts new runs for your published campaigns. The earlier runs stay in the run history.
• While it is off, the Performance page shows Measurement is off instead of your campaigns.

The two tracking modes

Cookieless only (default)

adfit stores no visitor id and nothing that identifies the visitor. Visitors are counted with an anonymous hash that changes daily. Nothing about them is readable after that day ends.

The trade off is length of memory: a visitor who comes back the next day is a new visitor for the statistics and may end up in the other group. That makes a measured lift slightly smaller than reality, never bigger. See Reading A/B results.

Stored id with consent

adfit waits for your consent tool. When a visitor accepts, your tool calls window.adfit.consent(true) and adfit then remembers that visitor with a random id in their browser for 30 days.

Without consent, adfit measures that visitor the cookieless way, exactly as in the default mode above. Once they accept, adfit recognizes them with the stored id instead. If your consent tool treats a refusal as "no measurement at all", call window.adfit.optOut() on refusal instead of window.adfit.consent(false).

Switch modes with the radio buttons and press Save changes. The change does not end your running experiments.

Connect your consent tool

Any tool that can run a script when a visitor accepts will work, Cookiebot, Usercentrics and Complianz among them. Put the adfit call into the script your tool runs on acceptance:

window.adfit.consent(true)

And when a visitor declines or withdraws:

window.adfit.consent(false)

Which call belongs to a refusal depends on what your consent tool asks the visitor for:

• Consent to recognize visitors with a stored id: on refusal, call window.adfit.consent(false).
• Consent to statistics in general: on refusal, call window.adfit.optOut() (see Let visitors object).

A minimal example, using whatever event or callback your consent tool documents for acceptance:

// runs in your consent tool's "on accept" callback
window.adfit.consent(true);

• Calling it on every page load after acceptance is fine. The calls are idempotent.
• A given consent is remembered for 12 months. After that, adfit waits for a fresh signal from your tool.
• window.adfit.consent(false) deletes the stored id immediately. adfit keeps measuring in the cookieless way, exactly like the default mode.
• The calls do nothing harmful in the cookieless mode, so you can leave them in place if you switch modes later.

Let visitors object

For a visitor who wants no measurement at all, adfit has a second call you can put behind a link in your privacy policy:

window.adfit.optOut()

What it does, and what it deliberately does not do:

• It stops the measurement for that visitor: no visitor data, no conversions, no A/B counting.
• It deletes the stored id immediately, if there was one.
• Personalization keeps working. Visitors who opted out always see the personalized version, so objecting never costs them the experience you built.
• Visitors who opt out stay opted out until they clear their browser data. The objection does not expire, and window.adfit.consent(false) does not undo it.

An opt out link can be as simple as:

<a href="#" onclick="window.adfit.optOut(); return false;">
  Object to measurement
</a>

What adfit keeps in a visitor's browser

adfit uses your browser's web storage, never a cookie. In both modes it keeps:

• The version a visitor was shown (the personalization and the group), so the same visitor does not flip between versions from page to page. It contains a random local value that never leaves the browser and identifies nobody. How long it is kept is your Variant persistence setting, described on Snippet behavior.
• A small sending buffer for measurement events, so nothing is lost when a page is closed quickly.
• The consent state for your site, once your tool or the visitor sets one.

Only in the consent mode, and only after a visitor accepts, adfit adds a random id, stored for 30 days. It is not derived from anything about the visitor, it is never put into a URL, and it is deleted the moment consent is withdrawn or a visitor opts out.

Conversions are attributed for as long as adfit remembers the visitor's variant, which is why the persistence setting also decides how late a conversion can still count.

Your legal texts

Your legal texts stay your responsibility. You decide what your site tells visitors, in which language, and where your privacy policy links to the opt out.

Related

• Reading A/B results: what the tracking mode changes about your numbers.
• Snippet behavior: the variant persistence setting and what the snippet does on a page.
• Privacy & security: how adfit handles your own account data.