{"slug": "how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies", "title": "how i track funnels without cookies", "summary": "Om Yaduvanshi, an 18-year-old applied AI developer, built Cloudline, a cookieless Google Analytics alternative that tracks conversion funnels using only anonymous pageview and button-click counts rather than per-visitor identity. The tool stores just page, referrer, screen size and time per pageview, and uses a data-cloudline-track attribute to count labeled button clicks between funnel steps. Yaduvanshi acknowledges the approach assumes clickers are a subset of viewers, but argues the shape of the drop matters more than exact per-user math.", "body_md": "i'm om yaduvanshi. i'm 18, an applied ai developer building **cloudline**, a cookieless **google analytics alternative**. one script tag, under **2 KB**, no cookies, no stored ips.\n\nfunnels are the one analytics feature that seems to need identity. a funnel says: 100 people saw the pricing page, 40 clicked start free, 12 signed up. to connect those steps you usually follow one person through the whole journey.\n\nhere's the problem. cloudline can't follow anyone.\n\nstrip identity out and a funnel stops describing individual visitors. it just describes the counts.\n\ncloudline counts pageviews and button clicks per page. a pageview stores four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. that's it. no cookies, no stored ips.\n\na funnel is those counts stacked in the order you care about. pricing page got 100 views. the start free button got 40 clicks. the signup page got 12 views. the drop between steps is the same drop. it was never attached to a name.\n\nwithout identity, the funnel can't guess your steps. a cookie-based tool watches a person move from page to page and draws the path for you. cloudline can't do that, so you pick the steps: this pageview, then this button click, then that pageview.\n\ni decided that was fine. the automatic version mostly invents paths you never designed anyway.\n\nbutton clicks fill in the middle of the funnel. add data-cloudline-track to the button and only the label is stored. clicks on \"start free\" sit between the pricing pageview and the signup pageview, which pageviews alone would never show.\n\na funnel with no identity has one honest caveat. it assumes the 40 people who clicked are inside the 100 who viewed. they probably are. sometimes they aren't. a visitor can click start free, leave, and come back tomorrow. cloudline counts that as one click and two visits. no way around it.\n\ni show the counts anyway because the direction of the drop matters more than the exact math. if 100 become 40 become 12, the shape of the problem is obvious. you don't need a person-level trail to know the pricing page leaks.\n\ni look at one funnel per important path. not ten. one.\n\nif the drop is between step one and two, the page doesn't sell the click. if it's between two and three, the button works and the next page doesn't. the funnel points at the problem. it doesn't diagnose it.\n\nlive visitors help here. when i change a page i watch today's visits in real time and see whether the counts start moving. same anonymous counts, just faster.\n\nyou lose the per-visitor journey. no \"user 482 bounced at step 2\". what you get is the shape of the funnel with zero tracking baggage: no cookies, no stored ips.\n\nfor an indie tool, that trade was easy. i'd rather explain one honest caveat than maintain an identity graph.\n\ni wrote about the other cookieless stitching problem last time: [https://dev.to/omyvnss/how-i-track-scroll-depth-without-cookies-jb9](https://dev.to/omyvnss/how-i-track-scroll-depth-without-cookies-jb9)\n\n**cloudline** is **free for early users** while i keep building it. cookieless analytics in one line of code.\n\n— om yaduvanshi", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/omyvnss/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies-5fd1", "published_at": "2026-09-29 04:11:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-29 04:16:40.808466+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Om Yaduvanshi", "Cloudline", "Google Analytics"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-track-funnels-without-cookies.jsonld"}}