What Crustat tracks on its own

The short version

Once the tracking line is on your site, Crustat records these by itself. You don’t add any code or change any setting.

• Page views
• How long each page stays on screen
• Clicks on links to other sites
• File downloads
• Clicks on email and phone links
• Campaign tags in your links

If you haven’t added the line yet, start with Add Crustat to your website.

Page views

Each time a page loads, Crustat records a page view. With it come:

• The page’s address. Only the domain and the path, like example.com/pricing. The rest of the address is dropped, apart from campaign tags (see below).
• Where the visitor came from. Only the other website’s name, like google.com, never the full address they were on.
• Roughly where they are. Country, region and city, from Cloudflare’s network. No IP address is stored.
• What they’re using. Browser, system (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android…) and device type: computer, phone or tablet.

Sites that change pages without a full reload, like React or Vue apps, work too. See Single-page apps.

Time on page

Crustat measures how long a page is actually on screen. The timer pauses when the visitor switches to another tab or app, and starts again when they come back. When they leave the page or switch away, the time is sent. Each stretch on screen adds up to 30 minutes at most.

This feeds Session time on your dashboard: how long a visit lasts, on average.

Links to other sites

A click on a link to another website is recorded. You’ll find these under Pages → Exit links.

• The address is kept without anything after a ? or #.
• A subdomain is treated as another site: a link from example.com to app.example.com shows up here.
• www.example.com and example.com are treated as the same site.
• The click never slows the visitor down: the link opens as usual.
• Middle-clicks and “Open in new tab” from the right-click menu aren’t recorded.

Email and phone links

A click on a mailto: link (opens an email) or a tel: link (starts a call) is recorded too, also under Exit links, with the address or number the link points to.

File downloads

A click on a link to a file is recorded as an event, named after the file: for example Download price-list.pdf. It shows up on the Events tab next to your own events, and you can use it in a goal.

The link’s address has to end in one of these file extensions (capitals or not):

pdf  zip  dmg  exe  msi  csv  xls  xlsx  doc  docx
ppt  pptx  epub  mp3  mp4  apk  rar  7z

Only a real extension works. A link to /files/report.pdf is a download. A page called /blog/how-to-zip is not. The whole name, “Download ” included, keeps its first 60 characters.

Campaign tags

If someone arrives through a link with utm_source, utm_medium or utm_campaign in it, Crustat keeps those three tags with the visit. They show up under Sources → Campaign, and they help sort visits into channels like Paid or Email. See Track campaigns with UTM tags.

What it leaves out

• Visits from your own computer on localhost, 127.0.0.1 or [::1]. Nothing is sent from there.
• Bots. Most never reach your stats. See How bots are kept out.
• Your own visits, if you ask. See Ignore your own visits.

For everything else you want to track, like a sign-up button or a contact form, see Track clicks, forms and sales. For the full list of what’s sent and stored, see What we collect.