Measuring your visitors

ClickWhale can connect your website to the best-known analytics and advertising services. You paste an ID; ClickWhale adds the script for you and makes sure it respects your visitors' cookie choices.

Why not just paste the script? Every one of these services gives you a snippet to paste into your website's HTML. If you paste it into Custom code → General, it loads for every visitor immediately, including visitors who refused cookies. Adding the ID here instead means ClickWhale holds the script back until that visitor has agreed to the right category.

Which one should I use?

You don't need all of them. Most websites use one analytics tool, plus a pixel if they advertise.

Plausible: statistics without a cookie banner

Plausible is a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics, with one property none of the others have:

Plausible sets no cookies and stores nothing on your visitor's device. There's nothing to ask permission for, so it measures without waiting for consent, and it keeps measuring for the visitors who refuse everything else. With Google Analytics, everyone who clicks "Reject all" disappears from your statistics. With Plausible, they don't.

The trade-off: Plausible is a paid service (Google Analytics is free) and gives you simpler numbers. Visitors, page views, sources, countries, devices. No funnels, no audience segments, no Google Ads integration.

Where to find your setting: you don't need an ID. Enter the domain exactly as you registered it in Plausible, without https:// and without www, for example example.com.

Google Analytics 4

The free standard. Detailed reports, and it connects to the rest of Google's tools.

Google Analytics uses cookies, so ClickWhale loads it only for visitors who accept analytics cookies. Visitors who refuse are not counted.

Where to find your ID:

1. Go to analytics.google.com and sign in.
2. Click the gear icon (Admin), bottom left.
3. Under Property, click Data streams and then your website.
4. At the top right you'll see Measurement ID, in the form G-XXXXXXXXXX.

Paste that into Google Analytics 4 ID.

Google tag

The Google tag (gtag.js) is Google's shared tag: one script that can feed Analytics, Google Ads conversion tracking, and remarketing at the same time.

A Google tag ID and a GA4 measurement ID are usually the same G-XXXXXXXXXX string. Google merged the two concepts and never really renamed them. So:

• If you only use Google Analytics, fill in Google Analytics 4 ID and leave Google tag ID empty.
• If you use Google Ads with a conversion ID (AW-XXXXXXXXX), put that in Google tag ID.
• If you have both and they're the same G- value, filling in both is harmless. ClickWhale loads the script once and won't count your visitors twice.

Where to find your ID: in Google Analytics under Admin → Data streams → your website → Configure tag settings. For Google Ads: Tools → Data manager → your Google tag.

Google Tag Manager

Tag Manager isn't a measuring tool. It's a container you put other tags into. Instead of asking us to add each new tool, you add them yourself in the Tag Manager interface, without touching your website.

Use it when you have several tags to manage, or when someone else (an agency, for example) handles your tracking. If you only want visitor statistics, you don't need Tag Manager. Use Analytics or Plausible directly.

ClickWhale loads Tag Manager only after a visitor accepts marketing cookies. ClickWhale also sends Google a consent signal on every page load (Google calls this Consent Mode), so Google knows whether it's allowed to measure and can still estimate what it's missing.

Careful with double counting. If you put Google Analytics inside your Tag Manager container and fill in the Google Analytics 4 ID here, every visit is counted twice. Pick one place.

Where to find your ID:

1. Go to tagmanager.google.com and sign in.
2. Choose your account and container.
3. The container ID is at the top right of the workspace, in the form GTM-XXXXXXX.

Meta Pixel (Facebook and Instagram)

The Meta Pixel measures what visitors do after clicking one of your Facebook or Instagram ads, and lets you show ads again to people who visited your site.

This is advertising, so ClickWhale loads it only for visitors who accept marketing cookies.

Where to find your ID:

1. Go to business.facebook.com and open Events Manager.
2. Click Data sources in the left menu and select your pixel.
3. The ID is shown under the pixel's name: a number of 15 or 16 digits.

Microsoft Clarity

Clarity is free and shows you something statistics can't: heatmaps of where people click, and recordings of real sessions. Useful when you want to know why a page isn't working, not just how many people saw it.

Clarity uses cookies, so ClickWhale loads it only for visitors who accept analytics cookies.

Where to find your ID:

1. Go to clarity.microsoft.com and sign in.
2. Open your project and click Settings → Overview.
3. Copy the Project ID, around ten letters and numbers.

Site verification

Separate section on the same page, different purpose: these prove to a search engine that the website is yours, so you can see how it performs in search results.

They're plain meta tags. No script, no cookies, nothing to consent to, so they're always active.

Google Search Console

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console.
2. Add your website as a URL prefix property.
3. Choose HTML tag as the verification method.
4. Google shows a line like <meta name="google-site-verification" content="AbC123..." />. You only need the part between the quotes after content=. Paste that.
5. Save in ClickWhale, publish your website, then click Verify in Search Console.

Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters.
2. Add your website and choose HTML Meta Tag as the verification method.
3. Copy the value from content="..." and paste it here.
4. Save, publish, then verify in Bing.

Publish first. Verification only works once the meta tag is live on your website. Save the setting, publish, and only then click Verify.

Cookie categories

The integrations on this page are placed in the right cookie category for you; The cookie bar lists what each category holds back. If you add a script yourself under Manage → Custom code, you choose the category by picking the right page: General, Functional, Analytics or Marketing. See Site-wide custom code.

Nothing is being measured. What now?

Check that you've published. Settings only reach the live website after you publish.

Check that you accepted cookies yourself. If you clicked "Reject all" on your own website, you won't be measured either. Click the cookie icon at the bottom left of your site to change your choice.

Give it a while. Google Analytics shows real-time visitors within a few minutes, but the full reports lag by up to 24 hours.

Check the ID. One wrong character and nothing arrives, with no error message anywhere. Copy and paste rather than typing.

Remember that visitors who refuse are not counted. Your numbers will be lower than the real number of visitors, for every tool except Plausible. That's not a bug.