Analytics - Are Anonymous user views able to be seen too?

[Adam Voakes]

Does the Analytics module allow you to view space, page usage data for not only known users but also visits from anonymous users too - so for example, where I have made a space public, can I see how many visits the space and its pages have from anonymous users?

So for example in the Page Analytics examples I have seen, there only ever seems to be data related to known users, however would be great to be able to see how many anonymous user visits there has been too - or is there another way to obtain this information to consider - maybe an AddIn someone could suggest?

[Hana Kučerová · Accepted solution]

Hi @Adam Voakes ,

yes, data for anonymous users are available (new user Anonymous appears in the statistics, if somebody, who is not logged in, do some activity in your Confluence).

[Helen Griffith]

Hi @Hana Kučerová 

Where can I see this data?

Thanks!

Helen

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Helen Griffith ,

you can find everything about the Analytics here. There are several places, where they are available.

[Helen Griffith]

Does that include anonymous user activity? That is what I am after... I don't want to change my Confluence plan (we currently are on the standard plan, it looks like analytics are available only for premium or enterprise plans) only to find that I still can't see anonymous data. Nothing in the pages you linked to mentions anonymous data.

Thank you!

[Hana Kučerová]

@Helen Griffith Yes, last time I've used this functionality it included anonymous user activity (when you have some public content).

Maybe you can start the trial for Premium plan and see, whether you get the data you want? Or create a new cloud test site with Premium plan and then cancel it?

[Helen Griffith]

I've started a trial! I can see activity by anonymous users! I've waited 8 years for this! I'm so excited :)

Thank you!

[Mattia _bitvoodoo ag_]

Hi Helen,
If you don't want to switch from the default plan to a higher plan, but still want to see the activities of the anonymous users, you can do this with the app Viewtracker - Analytics for Confluence.

Best regards

Mattia

[Helen Griffith]

Thank you Mattia. I didn't know about this app. I'll take a look. I'm currently using Google Analytics in Confluence but that still doesn't show Anonymous data... The Viewtracker app is also free (we have <10 users!) so that is probably the best solution.

[Rob Hearne]

Will this also give metric son page hits per anonymous user, or will all metrics be aggregated ?

[Mattia _bitvoodoo ag_]

Hello Rob, 

They will be aggregated because we are talking about anonymous users. Meaning there is no information tracked to distinguish if all the views happened by only one or several anonymous users.

If you want to distinguish visitors, you probably need to use Google Analytics. Google gets more data from visitors (IP address, browser etc) and can distinguish between new visitors and returning visitors. The disadvantage with GA is that you can identify the logged-in Confluence users or only with great difficulty if the user ID is passed on during tracking.

Best regards,
Mattia

[Rob Hearne]

Ok thank you Mattia. Only way around this so is to upgrade our license pack.

[Mattia _bitvoodoo ag_]

Not sure what you mean by "way around this"?

As described above, visits to Confluence and aggregated Anonymous users can be viewed with Confluence Built-in Analytics. If you are not on Data Center but on Confluence Cloud, then you would need to switch to either the Premium or Enterprise subscription that comes with the built-in Analytics.
Or instead of changing the subscription, you can also install and try an app for free and buy it if you like it and it fulfills your requirement.

If you look for a way around not having the anonymous user aggregated, then you need a solution that uses Google Analytics. 

I'm not sure how the distinction is made without tracking any form of user-identifiable information. Maybe it is a session-based assumption and not actually clearly different visitors. Because in this case, you would need to offer on the Confluence pages to the visitors a possibility of consenting or rejecting the tracking and storage of this kind of data. If you want information about this, I recommend contacting the vendors of these apps and asking them. 

Best regards

Mattia

[Mattia _bitvoodoo ag_]

I have an update. Since I don't often use the Confluence built-in Analytics, I noticed today that since a few days in the cloud version anonymous visitors are no longer all aggregated under "Anonymous". There is now one entry per visitor or session without further details and the number of views that were made.

This could be a bug and may be reversed again. I have not found any information from Atlassian announcing this change. If you indent to use built-in Analytics and this is important to you, better contact the Atlassian support or sales.

[Rob Hearne]

Interesting. Thank you Mattia. We will use Data Centre so this is n/a for us.  I will look at the Confluence App store for options.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

You can also use the Better Content Archiving app to collect analytics, including the views by anonymous users.

Those are list as a single "proxy" user called "Anonymous" when analyzing the views of a given page:

Similarly, you can feed the anonymous user's analytics to other mechanisms implemented by the app. For example, you can set all pages not viewed by anyone (including anonymous users) for N days to "Not viewed". Then you can get a content status report on these, send notifications about these, automatically archive these, etc.

(Discl. this app is a paid and supported one developed by our team. Free for 10 users.)