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What Umami Analytics Tracks—and What It Doesn’t

Umami reports page, device, campaign, and coarse location data without cookies, but site operators can add custom event properties and user identifiers.
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Umami can report more than pageviews: its standard tracker records page and session context, campaign parameters, and coarse location, while optional features add custom events and Core Web Vitals. Its documentation says the tracker does not use cookies, track people across websites, or store the IP address used for location lookup. But a site operator can configure custom properties or user IDs—including email addresses—so what an installation collects depends partly on how it is set up.

What Umami records by default

Umami’s v3 documentation describes a tracker that sends page and visit context for analytics. The fields available in reports include:

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  • Page context: website identifier, hostname, URL, referrer, and page title. URL query parameters may also be captured.
  • Device and browser context: browser, operating system, device class, screen dimensions, and browser language.
  • Location: country, region, and city derived from the request IP or available geolocation headers. Umami says it uses the IP for the lookup but does not store it.
  • Campaign attribution: UTM values such as source, medium, campaign, content, and term, plus advertising click IDs when present in the URL, including gclid, fbclid, msclkid, ttclid, li_fat_id, and twclid.

These fields describe visits and their context; browser or device attributes do not, by themselves, identify a person. Umami’s metrics reference explains location and other report dimensions.

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What “no cookies” and “no personal data automatically” mean

Umami’s FAQ says its tracking code does not use cookies and does not track users across websites. Its product overview also says personal data is not collected automatically. Those statements describe the standard tracker’s behavior, not every possible payload a website can choose to send. Umami can derive session and visit metrics from request and browser context without cookies.

For location reports, the documentation says the request IP is used to determine location and is not stored by Umami. Location may be obtained from infrastructure headers, including Cloudflare or Vercel, or from MaxMind GeoLite. This is distinct from saying no IP address is ever involved in processing.

See the Umami FAQ and metrics reference for the product’s descriptions of cookies, cross-site tracking, and IP-based location.

What custom tracking can add

Site operators can send event names and properties, as well as optional session properties. These can describe actions such as button clicks, purchases, or product variants. HTML data attributes store values as strings; tracker functions can send richer JSON types. The operator controls what is included in the payload.

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Umami also supports a Distinct ID. If a site supplies one, it can associate activity across sessions or devices. The official logged-in-user guide demonstrates sending user IDs and email addresses, so a configured implementation can be personally identifying even though those values are not collected automatically by the standard tracker.

Unless there is a clear purpose and the site’s privacy obligations permit it, avoid placing email addresses or other direct identifiers in event or session properties. Consult the tracker functions, custom events, and logged-in user identification guides for implementation details.

Optional performance metrics

When performance collection is enabled, Umami can collect Core Web Vitals and related timing metrics: LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB. Performance tracking is a configuration option rather than an assumption that every installation sends these values. The documentation labels performance collection v3.1.0.

See tracker configuration for the performance setting.

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How configuration changes collection

Umami’s current tracker documentation covers v3. Automatic mode includes pageviews, click tracking, path-change detection, and optional performance tracking. Depending on the version and configuration, an operator can change what runs or what is sent:

  • Disable automatic pageviews while retaining other tracker features.
  • Disable tracker initialization.
  • Exclude URL search parameters or fragments, useful when URLs may contain sensitive values.
  • Respect Do Not Track.
  • Intercept a payload to inspect, edit, or cancel it before transmission.

Some controls are version-specific: automatic pageview opt-out is labeled v3.2.0, while performance collection is labeled v3.1.0. Check the version in use and its matching documentation rather than assuming every Umami installation exposes identical settings.

How long data is retained

For self-hosted Umami, the FAQ says data remains indefinitely until an operator manually deletes it. The FAQ directs Cloud users elsewhere for current Cloud retention terms, so self-hosted retention should not be taken as a statement about Umami Cloud.

See the FAQ for the self-hosted retention statement and its Cloud reference.

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What to check on a specific site

To understand what a particular website sends, its configured tracker matters more than the product’s general feature list. Check whether it sends query strings, custom events, session properties, Distinct IDs, or performance metrics; and whether it filters or edits payloads before sending them. A site’s privacy notice may also explain its own choices, but Umami’s capabilities alone do not establish what that site has enabled.

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