Understanding your visitors without crossing GDPR lines

You can learn a lot about what your visitors want without building a file on each of them. A few choices make the difference between useful and risky. This isn't legal advice, but it's a good place to start the conversation with your adviser.

Store less

You don't need IP addresses to understand intent. Pages, order and timing tell you what someone is interested in; a rough location (country, city) can be worked out at the moment of the visit and the address thrown away.

Set retention: activity after a few months, contact details after a year or two, inactive visitors deleted entirely.

Ask for contact details, with consent

When someone asks for a call back or a guide, the request itself is your basis to reply. Following up later (a newsletter, a sales email) is different: ask, with an unticked box, and keep a record of what they agreed to.

Every follow-up email needs an easy way out.

Mind the browser storage rules

Storing an identifier in someone's browser can need consent under the ePrivacy rules in the EU and UK. A tool should let you wait for consent, or work without storing anything until then.

Know where the data lives

Pick tools hosted in the EU, with a data processing agreement and a list of sub-processors you can show your customers.

How Signal handles it

Signal doesn't keep IP addresses (a spam check uses a one-way daily code for two days), keeps contact details only when people give them, records consent with its wording and time, deletes old data on the schedule you set, and runs in Frankfurt. In the EU and UK it remembers returning visitors only once your cookie banner allows it; until then it works within the visit. Every follow-up email has a one-click unsubscribe.

Questions

Do I need a cookie banner for visitor tracking?

Often yes in the EU and UK, depending on what's stored in the browser and why. Ask your adviser; Signal can wait for your banner's consent.

Is Google Analytics GDPR-compliant?

It can be configured more or less carefully; regulators in several EU countries have raised concerns about it in the past. Check the current guidance in your country.

Where is Signal's data stored?

In the EU: the app runs in AWS Frankfurt and the database in Frankfurt too.

Try Signal on your site

We'll set it up with you, in shadow mode first, so you see what it would do before your visitors do.