Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Django Analytics different than other tracking solutions?

Most web tracking and analytics solutions focus on sales and marketing: bounce rates, conversion funnels, visitor sources, advertising effectiveness and so on. Django Analytics focuses on the stuff that comes after sales and marketing: actual registered users using your web application.

This focus allows you to learn a great deal about your users, improve your application and provide better customer support and problem resolution.

Another important difference is that typically, web analytics platforms only track HTML pages, and are completely blind to all the AJAX requests that happen behind the scenes in modern web applications. Django Analytics tracks each and every request.

How does it work?

We use a hybrid client-side / server-side solution which ensures that every request is trackable. The Django Analytics middleware plugs straight into Django's User model, collecting all the information it needs. Then, this information is inserted into the HTML response as a single asynchronous client request. In case the response is not an HTML document, the tracking data is sent directly from the server (asynchronously, of course).

Do you use cookies?

Django Analytics adds cookies to the response in order to determine visit lengths and collect information about new registrations. Note that these are first-party cookies, set by your application under your domain. We do not use any third-party cookies.

What do you do with the data you collect?

The tracking data collected from your web application is yours. We will never sell, trade, or otherwise transfer it to outside parties unless required to do so by the law. You may contact us and request its deletion.

What is required in order to start using Django Analytics?

• Your site must be running Django 1.2 or later
• You must be able to install a new package on your server (using easy_install or pip)
• You need to add a line to your settings.py file

How will Django Analytics affect the performance of my web application?

The effect on performance is very small.

• Our middleware collects the necessary information as efficiently as possible, making only one database request (which can be turned off as well - see DJANGO_ANALYTICS_TAG_USER_GROUPS). Note that most of the information is collected only for users who are logged in, therefore the effect on anonymous visitors is truly negligible. Typically the middleware adds less than 1 millisecond to the processing time of each request.
• In case of client-side tracking, only a single asynchronous request is added to each page, so your users will not notice any difference.
• Server-side tracking requests are sent via a separate thread, so they do not block your web application from processing other requests.

How much does this service cost?

Please refer to the pricing page.