Analytics

Wake counts visits itself. Nothing is sent to another company, and the data stays in data/stats/ on your server.

Two levels

	Level 1 · without cookies	Level 2 · with consent
Recognises a visitor	for one day, by a salted hash	for up to 12 months, by the cookie wake_v
Needs consent	no (configurable, see below)	yes, category Statistics
Stores on the device	nothing	one first-party cookie
Answers	visitors and page views per day, sources, campaigns, pages, reading time, scroll depth, countries, languages, devices, events	additionally returning visitors

Every report shows which share of visitors was counted with consent.

The daily hash

For level 1, public/hit.php computes

hmac_sha256(IP address | user agent | host, salt of the day)

and keeps the first 16 characters. The salt is a random value created each day in data/stats/salt/ and deleted the next day by maintenance. Once it is gone, nobody can work out who a hash belonged to, not even you. The IP address itself is never written to disk.

Legal note. This approach is used by Plausible and Fathom and is widely considered consent-free. Whether reading the user agent falls under § 25 TDDDG (Germany) or similar rules is disputed. That is why Wake plays safe by default: tracking.level1 is 'consent', so Wake only counts people who agreed in the banner. Set it to 'always' (in the panel under Settings) to count every visit without asking, after checking that this is allowed for your site.

What is measured

The tracking script (track.js, about 1.3 KB compressed) sends:

• page view: path, query string (for utm_* campaigns), referrer, language of the page
• leave: active reading time (only while the tab is visible) and the maximum scroll depth, when the visitor leaves or switches tabs
• events: clicks on external links and downloads, sent forms, and your own events: wake('event', 'Signed up', 'newsletter')

public/hit.php adds device type, browser and operating system, which it derives from the user agent, and the country if you installed a country database. It skips

• bots and crawlers (a list of known user agents),
• members of your team signed in to the panel,
• visitors with Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, if tracking.respect_privacy_signals is on.

hit.php does not start Laravel. A hit costs about as much as serving a small file.

AI crawlers

Crawlers of AI companies (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others) never run the tracking script, so public/index.php recognises them by their user agent and appends a line with the crawler's name and the path to data/stats/ai/{day}.log. The statistics page shows them in the card AI is reading along. They are kept as long as raw data.

Storage

data/stats/
  raw/2026-10-17.log       one line per hit, tab-separated, appended with a lock
  daily/2026-10-16.json    summary of a finished day
  monthly/2026-10.json     summary of a month
  salt/2026-10-17          today's salt
  ai/2026-10-17.log        visits of AI crawlers
  .config.php              rules for hit.php, written by Wake

A raw line looks like this (tabs shown as →):

1792315313→pageview→812ab8b356cf39c2→→/hello-world→social.example→mastodon→→launch→en→DE→mobile→Safari→iOS→→→0→0→1

Maintenance turns finished days into summaries and deletes raw files after tracking.retention days. Summaries are small and kept forever.

Numbers you should know

• Visitors over several days are added up. Without a cookie, a person who visits on Monday and Tuesday counts twice in a weekly report. Every cookieless analytics tool works like this.
• Reading time is the average active time per page view that ended with a leave signal.
• Read-through rate is the share of those page views that scrolled to at least 90 %.
• Sources count entrances: the first page view of a visitor that day, or any page view that came from another site. An empty source means direct.
• Next pages follow a visitor through the site within a day. They power the post journey view.

In code

use Wake\Stats\Stats;

$report = app(Stats::class)->period('7d');   // today, yesterday, 7d, 30d, 90d, 12m, month
$report->visitors();
$report->pages();                            // with the entry behind each path
$report->top('referrers');
app(Stats::class)->realtime();               // visitors in the last five minutes