Tracking and cookies on your website

Owners and admins open Settings → Website and paste either or both of these:

• Your Meta Pixel ID: the number shown for your pixel in Meta’s Events Manager (digits only).
• Your Google Analytics 4 measurement ID: it starts with G- and is under Admin → Data streams in Google Analytics. Older Universal Analytics IDs (UA-) and Google Tag Manager IDs (GTM-) aren’t accepted, and the form says why.

Leave a field empty to switch that tracker off. Every change is logged with who made it and when. With no IDs, your site shows no cookie banner and loads nothing from Meta or Google.

Once you add an ID, your site asks each visitor first, in a banner at the bottom of the page, whether it may use Meta Pixel or Google Analytics cookies. Accept and Reject are the same kind of button, side by side (as GOV.UK does), so saying no is as easy as saying yes, and one click does either.

• Until the visitor answers, nothing from Meta or Google loads.
• After Reject, nothing loads, and the trackers’ cookies (_ga and _ga_ followed by your ID from Google, _fbp and _fbc from Meta) are cleared.
• The answer is remembered for 6 months in a cookie on your own site (studio_consent). After that, the banner asks again.
• Visitors can change their mind at any time from Cookies at the foot of every page: your site’s cookie page shows their choice and a Change my choice button.
• If you add a second tracker later, visitors who said yes are asked again. A no stands.

Only after a yes, your site reports these moments:

• Sign-up: a new client finished signing up (Google Analytics: sign_up; Meta: CompleteRegistration).
• Lead: someone ordered your intro offer to pay at the studio, or told you when they would come under “Can’t find a time?” (Google Analytics: generate_lead; Meta: Lead).
• Booking: a place in a class, a private or a course (Google Analytics: booking; Meta: Schedule).
• Purchase: an order paid online (Google Analytics: purchase; Meta: Purchase). Today that only happens when a gift card pays the whole order; card payments will use the same event when they arrive.

Each event says what was booked or bought, such as the class or product name and its price. It never carries a name, email address or phone number.

Your site sends page views itself, with the address cleaned: anything after the ? is left out, apart from UTM tags. Meta and Google never see sign-in pages, the health form and waiver, a client’s account pages, links from your emails (offers, unsubscribe, group invites) or the kiosk.

With a yes, your site also remembers the UTM tags of the link a visitor arrived by for 30 days (studio_utm), so a booking later is counted for that link, and carries a sign-up or booking to the next page in a cookie that lasts 5 minutes (studio_events).

Google Analytics can also count page changes by itself when enhanced measurement is on for your web stream. In Google Analytics, open your web stream’s enhanced measurement settings and look for page changes based on browser history events: switch that off, so only the cleaned page views your site sends are counted.

Under the UK’s PECR rules, cookies a site doesn’t need in order to work need the visitor’s yes first, and that is what the banner asks for. Your site’s cookie page lists every cookie it sets and what Meta and Google are told.