Cookie or cookieless: how to choose

Two tracking modes, one product

Clickbase supports two tracking modes, set per site in Tracking settings. Cookie mode is the default for a new site. Cookieless mode is available whenever you want it, most often to avoid showing a consent banner.

What cookieless tracking does

In cookieless mode, Clickbase never writes a cookie or any other identifier to the browser. Instead it derives a visitor fingerprint from a daily-rotating salted hash of the visitor's IP address and user agent. The salt changes at UTC midnight, so the same visitor's fingerprint stays stable within a day and changes the next.

What it costs you

That daily rotation is the tradeoff. A visitor who returns tomorrow gets a new fingerprint and is counted as a new visitor, not a returning one. Losing cross-day identity is what lets Clickbase avoid setting a cookie in the first place, so it isn't a bug, it's the mechanism.

Within a single day, sessions still stitch correctly, and Clickbase bridges a session across the UTC midnight boundary so one continuous visit is not artificially split in two. But past that bridge, or on a second visit a day later, there is no link back to the earlier one.

If your reporting depends on knowing how many visitors come back, how long it takes them to convert, or building funnels that span more than a day, cookieless mode will undercount and misattribute that behavior.

What cookie mode gives you back

Cookie mode sets a lightweight first-party identifier in the browser and uses it as the visitor id across visits. That is what makes returning-visitor counts, multi-day funnels, and longer conversion windows accurate.

Whether cookie mode requires you to show a consent banner depends on how the cookie is used and which regulations apply to your visitors, not on anything Clickbase can decide on your behalf. Check that against your own compliance requirements before you pick a mode for a site.

How to choose

Pick cookie mode when you need accurate returning-visitor and multi-day metrics, and you are prepared to handle whatever consent requirement applies to your audience. Pick cookieless mode when avoiding a consent banner matters more than cross-day identity for that site, for example a single-purpose landing page where you only care about same-day behavior.

The mode is set per site, so you can run cookie mode on your main product and cookieless mode on a campaign site if that split fits your compliance posture better.