Answers to the most common questions about Crafty Meerkat, visitor tracking, and getting the most from your data.
How does visitor tracking work?
On Growth and Agency plans (and during the free trial), Crafty Meerkat assigns each visitor a first-party ID scoped to your site only. That is what unlocks the full picture: new vs returning visitors, multi-day journeys, and accurate unique counts — the data the AI uses to give you better recommendations. Starter plans identify visitors with a one-way daily hash of non-personal attributes that resets every 24 hours. Either way, no names, emails, or other personal details are collected, and raw IP addresses are never stored.
Is Crafty Meerkat GDPR compliant?
Crafty Meerkat is built with compliance in mind: all tracking is first-party (we never track visitors across websites), we do not collect names, emails, or other personal details, raw IP addresses are never stored, and your data is never shared, sold, or used for advertising or profiling. Crafty Meerkat uses a persistent first-party identifier, which your site's existing consent policy may need to cover depending on your jurisdiction.
What is the difference between page views and unique visitors?
Page views count every time a page is loaded, including repeat views by the same person. If one visitor refreshes your homepage three times, that is three page views. Unique visitors count individual people — that same person counts as one unique visitor regardless of how many pages they view. In general, page views will always be higher than unique visitors. Both metrics are useful: page views measure total traffic volume, while unique visitors measure audience size.
How does the AI analysis work?
Each Monday, Crafty Meerkat compiles your previous 7 days of analytics data — including page views, traffic sources, top pages, bounce rates, and visitor trends — along with your business context (your site description, goals, and industry). Crafty Meerkat then analyzes the patterns using AI powered by Anthropic and generates 3 to 5 specific, ranked recommendations. These are actionable insights tailored to your actual data, not generic advice. The report is emailed to you and saved in your dashboard.
Can I export my data?
Yes. Crafty Meerkat supports data export in CSV, JSON, and Google Analytics-compatible formats. You can export by date range, metric type, or full dataset. Your data belongs to you — we make it straightforward to download, analyze externally, or migrate if you ever need to. Data export is available on all plans.
What platforms does Crafty Meerkat work with?
Crafty Meerkat works with any website or web application that can include a JavaScript snippet. This includes static sites, WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Next.js, Gatsby, Hugo, Ghost, and custom-built applications. Installation takes about 30 seconds — just paste a single script tag into your site's HTML head. The tracking script is under 2KB and loads asynchronously, so it will not slow down your site.
How does uptime monitoring work?
Crafty Meerkat sends HTTP requests to your website at regular intervals from multiple geographic locations. If your site fails to respond or returns an error status code, you are notified immediately via email. The uptime monitor also tracks response time trends over time, so you can spot performance degradation before it becomes a problem. Your uptime history is displayed as a visual timeline in your dashboard, making it easy to see patterns and correlate downtime with traffic changes.
What are UTM parameters and how do I use them?
UTM parameters are tags you add to URLs to track where your traffic comes from. There are three main parameters: utm_source (the platform, like "google" or "newsletter"), utm_medium (the channel type, like "cpc" or "email"), and utm_campaign (the specific campaign name, like "spring-sale"). To use them, append them to any URL you share. For example: yoursite.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch. Crafty Meerkat automatically detects and reports on these parameters — no setup required.