Websites · marketing
Signups, sending and your own visitor count.
Newsletter signups, the accounts your site sends through, and your own visitor analytics — all part of the website, kept in your own records.
Where it all lives
Where the signups, the sending and the counting live
All three sit inside the site, kept in your own records and edited in the same place you edit your pages.
Everything inside that edge is the site’s own. Nothing crosses to the dashed pair outside but a message you asked the site to send.
Signing up
Somebody says yes. Here is everything the site keeps.
Step the signup through and watch the row it leaves — the whole of what you end up holding about a person who signed up.
The signup sits on whichever page you put it on, and takes an email address, a phone number, or both — whatever you decided to ask for. Beside the fields a person can see is one they cannot, and anything that fills it in is answered politely and thrown away.
- Address
- priya@example.in
- Signed up on
- /spring-offers
- Asked
- Today, 11:04
- Confirmed
- —
- Code checked
- —
- Left
- —
- Standing
- Not on the list
And nothing else. Not where in the world they were, not the number their connection was using, not which other pages they had been reading, and nothing at all out of your office records. The row above is the whole of it.
Sending
Your own account carries it — and another one carries it when that fails
It sends through an account you own, in your name and at your address, with a password even the office side cannot read back.
Set up more than one and the site tries them in the order you put them in. The first that can send, sends. A message only fails after every one of them has failed, and the site tells you which account refused and what it said.
Each mail account can prove itself before you rely on it: the site checks it can sign in, and sends a real test message so you can see exactly what lands. Change anything and it is marked untested again, because an account that worked last month with last month’s password is not a working account.
A WhatsApp Business number connects the same way and behaves the same way, in the order you choose, falling back the same way. Test one and the site brings back the name recipients see, the number it displays as, and the quality mark WhatsApp itself has given it — which is the thing quietly deciding whether your messages arrive at all.
Knowing who came
What the count holds, and what it never holds
The site does its own counting, and this is the whole of the bargain: what it keeps, and what it will not.
What the count holds
- Which pages were opened, in what order, and which one somebody arrived on and left from.
- How long a page was really in front of them rather than merely open, and how far down they got.
- Where they came from — the site that linked to them, or the tag on the link if you put one there.
- Phone, tablet or desktop; which browser; the country they were in.
- The moments you care about: something added, a request sent, a form filled, an order paid, and what it came to.
- All of it totalled by day and kept for a couple of years, so this March can sit beside last March.
What it never holds
- No name, no email address, no phone number. Nothing on the count says who.
- The number their connection was using is read once, on your own machine, only to work out which country they were in — and then it is gone. It is never written down.
- No cookie does the counting. The one tag it keeps is a random one, kept by that browser, meaningless on any other site and joined to no customer of yours.
- Nobody else receives a copy. The count goes to your own site and stops, so there is no other company in the arrangement to pass it on.
- Only the people you have let into the office side of the site can read any of it at all.
Add somebody else’s tag later and the banner holds it back until the visitor answers. Their answer stays in their browser, not in a record here.
Being found
The parts a search engine actually reads
A handful of small files decide whether you are found. They are settings here, and the site writes them out itself.
- A map of every page
- Written out fresh each time a search engine asks for it, so a page you added this morning is already on it. Anything you marked private is left off the map and out of the results together.
- A note to the crawlers
- Which corners of the site to leave alone. The assistants that now read sites on people’s behalf are named separately from the search engines, so whether yours is one they may read is your decision and not theirs.
- A plain description for assistants
- A short account of what the site is and what is on it, written for the assistants people ask instead of searching. It is generated from your own pages rather than guessed at.
- The words a result shows
- A title, a description and a picture, per page, in your wording — and the same again for what appears when somebody shares the link in a message.
- Proof for the search console
- The code Google or Bing asks for before it will show you your own standing. It is kept in one place and written into the page for you.
- An address that moved
- Old addresses keep landing on the right page. A forward only ever runs where an address would otherwise come up empty, so it can never quietly cover a page that is still live.
What owners ask
The questions this always comes down to
Mostly about who ends up holding what — the list, the letter and the count of who came.
No. The signup, the list it fills, the count of who visited, the banner, the search settings and the accounts you send through are all parts of the site, set up in the same place, on the same day, by the same people. The only outsiders in the arrangement are the ones that physically carry a message: the mail account you send through, and WhatsApp itself.
No, and that is worth saying plainly, because a website on its own is a normal thing to own. The list, the count, the search settings and the sending accounts belong to the site and work on a site joined to nothing else. Join it to KaryalayOne later and none of this changes — what changes is what the shop pages can show.
Into your site’s own list, and nowhere else. Not into a marketing company’s system that you would then be renting access to, not into your office records unless you put them there yourself, and not into a pile somebody else can search. The list comes out as a plain file whenever you ask for it.
The list is yours and it leaves as a file whenever you want it, so the letter can be sent from wherever suits you. What the site holds is the part that decides whether you may write at all: who said yes, the day they said it, whether they proved they could be reached, and how they said stop. Tell us how you send today and we will tell you how that fits.
A field a person never sees, which the machines fill in and people do not — anything that touches it is thanked politely and thrown away. Behind it there is a cap on how fast the same visitor can send anything at all. There is no puzzle and no pictures of traffic lights to click, because those cost you real customers to catch machines a hidden field catches for nothing.
It sends through your own WhatsApp Business number, using wording WhatsApp has approved beforehand — that is how WhatsApp requires it to work for anybody. What it sends that way is the short code that proves somebody is who they say they are, and where you have several numbers connected it will try the next one when the first cannot deliver. Replies land on your number, where your people already read them.
Yes. Other people’s tags can be added to the site, and where consent applies the banner holds them back until the visitor has answered — the answer stays in their own browser rather than in a file about them. The site’s own count carries on beside them, and costs you nothing, so most owners end up keeping it and letting the other one lapse.
Tell us who you are trying to reach
Who you want hearing from you, what you would like to know about the people who visit, and what you are signing in to at the moment to find it out. We will tell you what a site can take off that list.