Website visitor tracking
Deacon’s website visitor tracking is free on every plan, with no limit on page views. It counts the people who come to your site, where they came from, what they read and whether they signed up. Some tools sold under the same name do something else. They work out which company, or even which person, a visit came from and sell you that as a sales lead. Deacon counts visitors and doesn’t identify companies or people. It’s an AI customer support agent for founders that answers your customers in seconds, and the script that runs its chat also counts your visitors, sources and goals. So one line of code shows you where people come from and what they ask, and tagging your sign-up button shows you who signs up.
On every plan, including the free one.
At a glance
| What it counts | Visitors, page views, visits, pages per visit, the share who left after one page and time on site, over 7, 30 or 90 days or all time, each with its change. Under them are your pages, entry pages, sources, countries, devices, browsers and systems. |
|---|---|
| What it never does | It never identifies companies or people. Every figure on Analytics › Website is a count, and no visitor there has a name, a profile or a history you can open. |
| Goals and funnels | Tag a sign-up, or any moment that matters, with a line of code, an attribute or a class. A funnel puts two to five steps in order and counts the visitors who made them within one visit. |
| Cookies | A page view is counted without one, from a hash that changes every day. The script does set deacon_visitor_id as it loads, and keeps the same id in local storage, so Deacon can tell a returning visitor from a new one. |
| IP addresses | Website analytics stores none. The chat keeps its visitors’ addresses for 30 days. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control aren’t read. |
| Install | The script tag that runs Deacon’s chat, with nothing else to add. A single-page app is counted each time its path or query changes. |
| Plans | All of them, the free one included, and no plan limits page views. The free plan needs no card and has no end date. |
| What it isn’t | A full analytics suite. There are no filters, custom date ranges, exports, revenue figures or ad reports. |
What Deacon counts once the script is on your site
It all lives on one page of the dashboard, Analytics › Website, and it starts with your first visitor.
One script tag, and counting starts
The site you give when you sign up is already on the Install page. Copy the script tag there and paste it before the closing body tag, or copy the prompt for your coding agent, which adds the tag and checks it’s live. It’s the same tag that runs the chat widget, so there’s no second script. A page view is counted when a page loads, when a page opened in a background tab is first looked at, and each time a single-page app moves to a new path or query. Development addresses such as localhost, automated browsers, bots and domains that aren’t on your list are never counted, so a copy of your snippet on someone else’s site adds nothing. The Install page tells you when Deacon has been seen live on your domain.
Who came, from where, and what they read
Six numbers run across the top. They’re visitors, page views, visits, pages per visit, the share who left after one page and time on site, each against the period before (on all time, the last 30 days against the 30 before). The chart draws visitors, page views or visits by day, week or month, with the same days of the period before as a dashed line. Below it, your pages are ranked by views and your entry pages by visits. Sources show the site that sent each visitor, or the tag on the link, such as utm_source or ref, and a visit with no referrer reads Direct. Nothing is grouped into channels, so google.com is listed as google.com. A visitor from a Product Hunt listing reads producthunt, from the ref tag Product Hunt adds to its links, as the Product Hunt launch checklist explains. Then come countries, on a map or as a list, and devices, browsers and systems. A visitor is counted once per UTC day, so someone who comes back tomorrow counts again, and a visit ends after 30 minutes with nothing happening.
Goals and funnels, named by you
A goal is a moment you want visitors to reach, such as signing up or booking a demo. Send one from your code with Deacon.track('Sign up'), add data-deacon-goal="Sign up" to a button, a link or a form, or give an element the class deacon-goal--Sign+up in a site builder that only lets you set a class. A tagged link still goes where it was going. Name your goals in the dashboard and each one waits there for its first visitor, or hand the prompt beside them to Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, which tags them for you and checks that each one arrives. A goal sent from localhost shows as arrived and is never counted, so you can try it first. Put two to five steps in order and you have a funnel, counted within one visit, which can start from Visited, meaning any page.
What stands out, in plain sentences
Worth knowing writes up to five sentences from your own numbers, each linking to the card it came from. It speaks up when a new JavaScript error appears, when traffic spikes, when an error hits a page where a goal happens, when one source converts better than the rest, when a device converts worse, or when a funnel’s rate moves. The Sources card rates every source against one goal, which is Sign up if you have a goal by that name, else the end of your first funnel, else the first goal to arrive. The Errors card lists the JavaScript errors your own scripts throw, one row per bug, with how many people hit each.
Visitor tracking is free, with no limit on page views
Add the script, tag your sign-up button, and see which sources send the visitors who sign up. You get 50 answers a month on the free plan, and it needs no card.
What website visitor tracking should count
These hold whichever tool does the counting, and none of them needs to know who anyone is.
People before page views
200 people reading 50 pages each and 5,000 people reading 2 each both make 10,000 page views. Read the visitor figure first, then the page views.
Where each visitor came from
A visit from a newsletter or a chat app often arrives with no referrer, and most tools file it under Direct. Add a tag such as utm_source=newsletter to every link you share, and the visit is filed under the name you gave it. Our free UTM builder adds the tags to a link for you.
One goal to judge every source by
Traffic alone tells you little. Pick the one thing you need visitors to do, usually signing up, and compare sources by the share of their visitors who do it. A source that sent 50 people and 6 sign-ups is doing more for you than one that sent 1,000 and none.
The page before the goal
When few people reach a goal, find the page most of them saw last. If half your visitors leave from the pricing page, that’s where to work.
The same days last time
A figure means little on its own. This week against last week tells you whether something changed, and then you can look for what you did that week.
Your own visits left out
Keep your own browsing out of the count, or a quiet week looks busy. Check that your tool skips localhost, and leave a signed-in app out page by page.
Nobody’s name
You can learn all of this without knowing who anyone is. Counting visitors doesn’t need names, email addresses or a profile for each person, and the less you collect, the less you have to explain in your privacy policy.
Questions about website visitor tracking
Yes. Every feature is on the free plan, visitor tracking included, and no plan limits page views. The free plan needs no card and has no end date, and nothing on it is deleted for inactivity. A paid plan buys more answers, knowledge, pages a month from your website and seats for the chat, never more tracking. See the plans
No. Deacon never identifies companies or people. B2B tools such as Leadfeeder look up a visitor’s IP address in a database of company networks, and RB2B goes as far as named people for visitors in the US. Deacon turns the address into a hash that changes every day and never stores it with a page view, so there’s nothing to look up.
Counting a page view doesn’t. Each visitor is a hash of that day’s secret salt, your site, their IP address and their browser. The salt changes at midnight UTC and is deleted within 48 hours, so the count can’t follow anyone from one day to the next. The script itself does set a cookie, deacon_visitor_id, as it loads, before anyone opens the chat, and keeps the same id in local storage, so Deacon can tell a returning visitor from a new one. The cookie asks for 90 days, and Safari cuts a cookie set by a script to about 7. List both in your cookie policy.
No. Deacon shows no consent banner, has no consent setting and doesn’t read Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. Its script sets its cookie as soon as it loads, so if your site asks visitors before setting cookies, treat Deacon’s script like any other script that sets one.
A visitor is counted once per UTC day, so the same person tomorrow is a second visitor. That’s what counting from a daily hash means. Nothing in the count follows a person from one day to the next.
For a small site that wants to know how many people came, from where and whether they signed up, yes. Google Analytics does far more, such as ecommerce revenue, audiences and links to Google Ads, and Deacon has none of those. The two don’t get in each other’s way, so you can run both and compare. Google Analytics alternatives compared For where Deacon fits next to the rest, see website analytics tools compared.
You can hide the chat button in the Appearance editor, and the counting carries on. There’s no analytics-only install, so the script still sets its cookie.
Add data-no-page-views to the script tag on that page, as you might across your signed-in app. Page views and JavaScript errors stop being sent from it, and goals are still sent, so a sign-up or an upgrade inside your app still counts.
From the first page view or goal in a visit to the last one, averaged over every visit. A visit of one page lasted no time by that measure, and it still counts in the average. A visit that reached a goal on its only page isn’t counted as leaving after one page.
See where your visitors come from
It takes about five minutes to install. The free plan is 50 answers a month, for as long as you like.