How do I count visitors whose browser clears cookies every time?

Who does this

Firefox, Chrome and Edge all have a setting to delete cookies and site data when the browser closes, and some privacy-focused browsers and extensions do it by default. Private or incognito windows do the same when they close. People who choose this are often the more technical part of your audience, so developer tools see more of it than most.

What it does to your numbers

• Every session is a new visitor. Someone who visits daily for a month is thirty visitors.
• Returning-visitor rates look low and new-visitor counts look high.
• Sources blur. The first visit’s source is forgotten each time, so later visits tend to show up as direct.
• Funnels that span days break, because day two can’t be tied to day one.

Visits and page views are still counted correctly. Only the question “is this the same person?” can’t be answered from the browser.

What still works

1. Sign-ins. When someone signs in, link that visit to their account. A person can have any number of visitor ids, so each day’s new id joins the same person. Do it on every signed-in page load, since some people stay signed in through a cookie the browser keeps while clearing the rest.
2. Forms that take an email. A newsletter box, a contact form or a checkout does the same for people without an account.
3. Your user table. For signed-up users, count returning people from your own database (last seen, days active). It doesn’t depend on analytics cookies at all.
4. Tagged links. UTM tags are in the address, so a tagged click is credited correctly even on a browser that remembers nothing.
5. Ratios over time. If the share of these visitors stays about the same, week-on-week changes in new visitors still mean something, even if the total is too high.

What not to do

Don’t track them across sites or against their wishes. Recognising a returning browser by its network address and browser details is possible, but it needs consent in the EU just like a cookie, and it goes wrong on shared networks and identical phones. If you do it, keep it to one site, use a keyed one-way code rather than the address, and skip phones and anyone who said no.

With Nordva Launch

Launch links each visitor id to a person through identify() or data-nordva-identify on a form, and a person’s contact page shows the visits from all their ids. Insights → Visitors says how many of the people you identified came back on more than one id, which tells you how far “visitors” overstates people on your site. On a computer, for visits that may carry ids, Launch also recognises a browser that cleared its cookies by a keyed one-way code from its address, browser string and language, kept 30 days and never matched on phones; the address itself is never stored.