Turn on visitor tracking: Anonymous and Full mode

Visitor tracking is off until you pick a mode. You need the permission Manage settings (administrators have it). Read what marketing intelligence records first.

Choose Anonymous for simple counts with no cookie. Choose Full for contact journeys, "Identified" visitors and visits linked across days. Full needs visitor consent in the EU/EEA, the UK and most similar countries. Anonymous is not a way to avoid consent everywhere. See Consent and the law.

Switch on Anonymous mode #

1. Open Settings > Tracking & Privacy.
2. In the card Visitors on your site, set Visitor tracking to Anonymous (no cookie, no IP stored, a new daily code).
3. Check the cards that appear (What is recorded, Who and what is left out, Proxies and storage). See Settings: Tracking & Privacy.
4. Click Save changes.

Switch on Full mode #

1. Set Visitor tracking to Full (a first-party cookie links visits across days). The Consent field appears.
2. Leave Consent on Wait for consent (recommended). Nothing is recorded and no cookie is set until the visitor agrees.
3. Ask for consent with one of these:
   • Hive Mail's banner: in the card Consent banner, switch on Show Hive Mail's consent banner (the consent banner).
   • A cookie-consent plugin that Hive Mail follows (cookie-consent plugin). Leave Hive Mail's banner off.
   • Your own banner, which calls HiveMail.consent(true) when a visitor agrees to statistics.
4. Click Save changes.

The other Consent choice, Track straight away: I have a valid consent mechanism elsewhere, or my visitors need none, records from the first page view. Use it only if you are sure.

Test it #

1. Open a private window, logged out. Administrators are not tracked by default.
2. In Full mode with Wait for consent, accept statistics in the banner.
3. Open a few pages, then open Intelligence > Live. On the site now should show your visit within seconds.

Keep time and proxies #

In the card Proxies and storage, Keep visit details for is 90 days (7 to 365). Older visits and visitors not seen for 13 months are deleted daily by a scheduled task; daily totals stay. Behind a proxy or CDN, list its addresses in Trusted proxies (default: the server itself) so the request limit and Anonymous code use the real visitor address, which is never stored.

Tip: Clear your page cache after you switch tracking on, and do not combine, delay or remove hivemail-track.js in an optimisation plugin.

If Live stays empty, see Visitor tracking shows nothing. The amber message "Hive Mail is waiting for consent, so it records nothing yet." means Full mode is waiting and nothing has given consent yet.

Next: Live, Pages and Traffic Sources, Do Not Track and who is never tracked.

This is information, not legal advice.