Settings → Analytics controls how much visitor data Birkly collects for your public site. Saving Minimal+ auto-enables tracking for localhost and your site hosts. Choose one site-wide preset — Off, Minimal, Standard, or Advanced. Each option trades insight depth against privacy and compliance burden. Birkly shows the upsides and downsides in the admin; you remain responsible for privacy law in your region.
Warning: This page is product guidance, not legal advice. Birkly does not guarantee GDPR (or other) compliance. You remain responsible for privacy law in your region (for example GDPR in the EU/EEA), including consent, disclosure, and retention choices.
Beginner
Open Analytics settings
- Sign in to the Birkly admin with a role that can manage settings (usually Admin).
- Open Settings (gear icon or sidebar).
- Open the Analytics tab (or Settings → Analytics if your build shows it as its own destination).
- Pick a preset. Read the upside/downside on each card before saving.
- Click Save settings (global Save at the top of Settings).
If a domain is disabled for tracking, that domain collects nothing even when a site-wide preset is Standard or Advanced.
Choose a preset
| Preset | What it collects (typical) | Upside | Downside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Off | Nothing | Full privacy; no analytics stored | No visitor insights |
| Minimal | Page views by path, coarse referrer host, day buckets; no fingerprinting; IP not stored (or hashed only briefly for a day key); short retention (about 30 days) | Privacy-forward aggregates; often the lightest EU-friendly option | Least detail — totals and top paths only |
| Standard | Sessions, device/browser family, UTM, entry/exit, top pages, coarse country; longer retention (about 90 days) | Useful site trends and campaigns | Visitor consent / banner required; more compliance duty |
| Advanced | Everything in Standard, plus events such as outbound clicks, form submits, and plugin funnel hooks (for example commerce checkout); retention longer / configurable (about 180 days default) | Funnel-ready reports, richer event breakdown, CSV export where available | Strongest consent and disclosure duty; most data to govern |
Consent (Standard and Advanced)
- Off — no collection; no consent UI needed for analytics.
- Minimal — aimed at cookieless / aggregate-only collection. Birkly does not treat a consent banner as required for this preset alone, but you still decide what your jurisdiction and counsel require.
- Standard and Advanced — a visitor-facing consent / banner hook is required. Wire or enable the public-site consent component so collection only starts after the visitor accepts (or as your banner policy defines). Do not leave Standard+ live without a consent path on the public site.
What Analytics is not
- Not a hosted Matomo/Google Analytics replacement as a SaaS product.
- Not a legal compliance engine — honest presets and hooks only.
- Not the same as Commerce analytics (store orders and ops metrics inside the Commerce plugin).
Advanced Users
Site-wide vs domain: The preset is the site-wide default. Per-domain enable/disable still applies — a domain turned off does not collect.
Event taxonomy (when Advanced is on): examples include page_view, form_submit, outbound_click, and plugin events such as commerce_checkout_started or events_rsvp when those plugins emit them.
Reports: The Analytics surface is meant for trends, top pages, referrers, devices, and campaigns — not only a short “last 30 days” stub. Depth depends on the active preset.
Retention: Defaults follow the preset matrix above; Advanced may expose configurable windows. Reducing the preset does not automatically erase historical data already stored — check the Analytics UI for retention and purge options when you change levels.
Export: CSV export may appear under Analytics and/or when Developer mode is on, depending on your build.
API / storage: Analytics configuration lives with site settings (not in project/ HTML). Public-site collection runs through the Birkly client / tracking snippet for registered domains.
Further reading
- Settings
- Developer mode
- Commerce analytics — store metrics, not visitor presets
- Security
- Website integration