Trace Analytics

Trace follows a customer’s journey from first visit to sale and tells you which channels earned the money. This plugin does two things:

• Puts the Trace tracking tag on every page, once you paste your tracking key.
• Sends each paid WooCommerce order to Trace from your server: the order reference, its total, its currency, when it was paid and, if the order used a discount code, that code and the discount it gave. If the tracking tag had already given the shopper’s browser a random visitor key or request id, the order carries those too, so Trace can join it to the visit that led to it.

Trace never receives a name, an email address or a phone number from this plugin. Visitors who decline cookies are counted anonymously and are never named.

External services

This plugin sends data to Trace, the analytics service at https://usetrace.io, which is what the plugin is for. It is used in two places.

The tracking tag is loaded from your Trace address (https://app.usetrace.io by default) on every page, and reports page views and the events Trace measures. This happens for a visitor who has allowed analytics, in the ordinary way for an analytics tag.

When a WooCommerce order is paid, your server sends Trace the order reference, the total, the currency and the time it was paid. If the order used a discount code, it also sends that code and the amount it took off. The code is one you set up in your shop. It sends nothing else: no name, no email address, no telephone number, no address and no items. The order is sent a moment after payment by a background job, not while the customer is paying, and is tried again later if Trace cannot be reached.

On the checkout page, a small script reads the random visitor key and request id the tracking tag already stored in the shopper’s browser, and adds them to the order. They are random tokens, not a name or an email address, and the script stores nothing of its own. The order keeps them until it has been sent, then deletes them. Trace checks the shopper’s cookie choice before it uses either: an order from someone who has not decided waits with the rest of their visit until they do, and an order from someone who declined is never joined to them.

Nothing is sent until you paste a tracking key, and turning off “Send orders from this server as well” in Settings, then Trace, stops the second of these.

Trace’s terms are at https://usetrace.io/terms and its privacy notice is at https://usetrace.io/privacy.