A volunteer-run site needs four answers: who found us, which pages help, did anyone click Donate, and can we show the board. None of that needs cookies.
A nonprofit or community site needs a small, honest set of numbers: where visitors come from, which pages they read, and whether they clicked the buttons that matter. It does not need a profile of each visitor, and collecting one creates obligations a small organization is poorly placed to carry.
data-gm-event="donate-click" on the Donate button to count clicks. Completed donations, amounts and donors live in your donation platform, not in the analytics.Small organizations tend to get analytics in one of two ways: someone installs Google Analytics once and nobody opens it again, or nobody installs anything and decisions are made on instinct. Both leave value on the table. A neighborhood association, a food bank, an arts collective or a local club can answer most of its useful questions with a handful of numbers.
What you do not need is a persistent profile of each visitor, an ad audience or a cross-site identifier. A visitor reading about a food pantry, a health service or a support group is often doing so for a personal reason, and a site that tracks them across sessions turns that into a record. Choosing a tool that cannot do that is a simple way to keep the promise most organizations already make in their privacy policy. For the same reasoning in a business setting, website analytics for small business is a close companion.
Cookie-based analytics such as Google Analytics 4 generally requires consent in the EU and UK, which is why so many small sites carry a consent banner. For a volunteer-run site that usually means a plugin to maintain, a consent record to understand and a banner that covers part of the page on a phone. A cookieless tool avoids the cause rather than managing the symptom.
GhostMetrics sets no cookies and uses no localStorage. It stores no IP addresses (they are hashed in memory and discarded), keeps no cross-session identifier and honors Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track by collecting nothing for those visitors. Its only browser storage is a per-tab sessionStorage counter and any first-touch UTM, which clear when the tab closes. It does record location at country and city level, derived at the network edge, along with the visitor's network provider or organization name, browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language, so tell your visitors that in your privacy page rather than saying it records no data at all.
This is not legal advice, and the rules differ by country, by what else is on the page and by your donor and member data practices. Embedded video, social buttons, ad pixels and donation widgets can set their own cookies and carry their own requirements, and a cookieless analytics tool does not change that. Do I need a cookie banner and web analytics without a consent banner go through the reasoning in more detail, and your own counsel or regulator's guidance decides the question for your organization.
Most of the value comes from five views and a few tagged buttons. Here is what to look at and what each one answers for a community organization.
| Question | Where in GhostMetrics | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Is the site being found? | Overview: Visitors, Pageviews, trend vs previous period | Whether interest is rising or falling around a campaign or event |
| What do people read? | Pages: All Pages, Entry Pages | Which pages are front doors; where to spend editing effort |
| Where do they come from? | Sources: Referrers, Traffic Type | Search, social, direct and partner-site referrals |
| Did the newsletter or flyer work? | Sources: UTM Breakdown | Visits from links you tagged with source, medium and campaign |
| Did people click Donate or Volunteer? | Events: Custom Events | Event name, count and last triggered |
| Is the site usable on phones? | Visitors: device split; Performance: vitals by page | Whether mobile visitors dominate and whether key pages load slowly |
Button tracking is where analytics earns its place. You add one attribute to the element and clicks are recorded. A delegated listener handles every element on your page, including ones added after the page loads, so it works on buttons a script inserts, such as a modal. It cannot see clicks inside an embedded iframe, which is how many donation forms are delivered; tag the button on your page that opens the form instead.
<a href="/donate" class="btn" data-gm-event="donate-click">Donate</a>
<a href="/volunteer" class="btn" data-gm-event="volunteer-click">Volunteer</a>
<a href="/events#register" data-gm-event="event-register-click">Register</a>For something a click attribute cannot express, such as a form submitted in JavaScript, call window.ghostmetrics.track('newsletter-signup', { section: 'footer' }). Only section is stored as metadata. Keep names plain and lowercase, in the form thing-action, because they appear in the Custom Events panel as name, count and last triggered. If your donation page is public through a shared dashboard, remember that event names are visible there, so avoid names that describe sensitive services. The custom events guide covers naming in more depth.
<script defer src="https://ghostmetrics.nullagency.io/gm.js" data-site="YOUR-SITE-ID"></script>. On WordPress, a site builder or a website platform, look for a header injection or custom code setting, and check your plan's current documentation for whether it lets you add a script. There is no GhostMetrics plugin; if your builder cannot take a script in the head, it cannot run this tool.data-gm-event to Donate, Volunteer, Register, Subscribe and Contact. Start with three. Fewer, well-named events are easier to review than twenty.utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign to newsletter links, social posts and partner mentions. For a newsletter, utm_source=newsletter, utm_medium=email and a campaign name per issue works well, and the newsletter traffic guide expands on it. GhostMetrics stores source, medium and campaign only.One practical point for volunteer teams: the account is a single login. There are no team seats, roles or client logins. If the person who set it up leaves, the credentials need to be handed over like any other organizational account, so record them where the board can find them.
Boards and funders rarely want a dashboard; they want a page. Once a month, set the period to 30d and copy five lines into a document: the Visitors and Pageviews cards with their "% vs prev" trend, the top three pages from All Pages, the top three external sources from Referrers, the count for each tagged button on the Events tab, and one sentence about what you will change next month. Remember what Visitors means here: tab sessions that started, not distinct people, so describe it as "visits" in the report rather than "unique individuals".
If a funder asks for numbers the dashboard does not show, use the raw CSV export, which includes every stored row and every column; a manifest listing the columns is available from the export API. Keep last month's export alongside the report. The product keeps full history on every plan, but a copy you control is a sensible habit for any organization that reports to others.
The right tool depends on budget, who maintains the site and whether data must stay under your control. The table covers the common choices, qualitatively; prices and limits change, so check each product's current pricing page.
| Option | Cost model | Cookies and consent | Button clicks | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GhostMetrics | Free plan for one site, unlimited pageviews, no card. Pro $9.99/mo flat for more sites and a public dashboard | No cookies; no banner needed for the tool itself | Yes, data-gm-event or ghostmetrics.track | One site, a free start, clicks and UTMs, optional public page |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Free | Cookieless, no fingerprinting | No custom events | You only need traffic, pages, referrers and vitals. No UTM breakdown and no CSV button |
| Plausible | No free plan; 30-day trial without a card; paid tiers scale with monthly pageviews | Cookieless, EU-only processing | Yes (goals and custom events) | You want open source, EU hosting or self-hosting the Community Edition |
| Umami | Open source, self-hostable; check current docs for hosted options | Cookieless | Yes | Someone technical will run a server and you need to own the stack |
| Google Analytics 4 | Free | Cookies by default; consent generally required in the EU and UK | Yes | You need Google Ads attribution; check Google's current requirements if you run grant-funded ad campaigns |
Honest recommendations: if you run a single website and want custom button clicks without a banner, the free GhostMetrics plan fits. If you only want traffic basics and nothing to configure, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free and sufficient. If your board requires open-source software or EU-only processing, Plausible fits better, and a volunteer who can run a server may prefer Umami. Matching the tool to the organization beats matching it to a feature list. We do not list a nonprofit discount for GhostMetrics; check the pricing page for current terms.
On Pro, each site has a Share button in the dashboard header with a "Make dashboard public" switch. It publishes a read-only copy of the same dashboard, every panel and every period, at a public URL that needs no login, with a small "Powered by GhostMetrics" banner. Viewers can read the panels and download a CSV of an individual panel, but cannot pull the raw export or change anything. There is no per-viewer password, and you can unpublish at any time. On the free plan, the switch answers with an upgrade prompt. It is a good fit for sponsors, funders and members who like to see that the site is used, but think first about what is exposed: referrer addresses, page paths and custom event names are all visible. Share website analytics publicly covers what to leave out.
Be equally clear internally about what the tool does not do:
Those limits are the other side of the privacy design. They are why the tool needs no banner, and for most small organizations they are not the information gap that matters. The numbers that guide a volunteer's week are the first four questions in this guide, and those are all available.
GhostMetrics is cookieless web analytics with no cookies, no localStorage and no stored IP addresses. The free plan is free forever with no card: one website, unlimited pageviews, the real-time dashboard, every dashboard view, full history, plus raw CSV or JSON export on every plan. We use it on nullagency.io.
Several sites or a public dashboard URL for sponsors? Pro is $9.99/mo flat with unlimited websites (fair-use ceiling of 250) and a 30-day free trial; a card starts the trial, nothing is charged for 30 days, and you can cancel anytime. Count Donate and Volunteer clicks with data-gm-event="donate-click" on any element.
Disclosure: GhostMetrics is built by Null Agency and we use it on this site, so we are not a neutral party about our own product. We have kept the claims to what the free and paid plans do and pointed to other tools where they fit better. Nothing here is legal advice; privacy and consent rules vary by country and by what else is on your pages.