Europa Analytics

Europa Analytics is the corporate service that monitors and evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the European Commission's websites on Europa.

Both the infrastructure and software are under the full control of the European Commission and comply with the current EU data protection legislation.

Europa Analytics' privacy protection has been validated by the Data Protection Officer of the European Commission

Europa Analytics is maintained by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Digital Services and is provided as a service to website owners across the European Commission to ensure that our online communication is targeted, relevant and cost-efficient.

The service is present on Commission owned websites and pages under the europa.eu domain and its subdomains, but is implemented mainly on the main Commission subdomain ec.europa.eu.

The European Commission manages the inter-institutional website (top-level pages of the europa.eu domain) on behalf of all the EU institutions. The Europa Analytics service is also present on the top pages of the europa.eu website but requires separate consent. The privacy policy for the inter-institutional website is available here.

EU institutions and bodies other than the European Commission currently use their own analytics systems. Visit their legal notice pages for more information.

The European Commission's legal notice

First party cookies

Europa Analytics is configured to use the domain europa.eu (used by European institutions' websites) and to store first-party cookies that expire and will be automatically removed from the user’s device after 13 months.

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website stores on the visitor’s computer or mobile device. There are two types of cookies – session and persistent cookies.

Read more about our cookies here

Cookies used by Europa Analytics enable the European Commission to collect the following information about visitors that is used to prepare aggregated, anonymous statistics reports of visitors’ activity

• internet protocol (IP) address (anonymised)
• location: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (geolocation)
• date and time of the request (visit to the site)
• title of the page being viewed (page title)
• URL of the page being viewed (page URL)
• URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (referrer URL)
• screen resolution of the user's device
• local time in visitor's time zone
• files that were clicked and downloaded (download)
• links to an outside domain that were clicked (outlink)
• page generation time: the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the visitor (page speed)
• main language of the browser being used (accept language header)
• browser version, browser plugins (PDF, Flash, Java) operating system version, device identifier (user agent header)
• language of the visited page
• campaigns
• site search
• events

To improve the accuracy of the reports, certain information is also stored in first party cookies and then collected by Europa Analytics:

• random unique visitor ID
• time of the first visit by the specific visitor
• time of the previous visit by the specific visitor
• number of visits by the specific visitor

The European Commission retains full responsibility and control of the data collected through first party cookies by storing the data in servers fully controlled by the European Commission.

The data collected contains no personal information and the random unique visitor ID that is generated by the software cannot be used to identify a particular visitor. Data will not be shared with any other organisations for marketing, market research or commercial purposes.

“Do Not Track” is a technology that enables visitors to opt-out from being tracked by websites for whatever purpose, including the use of analytics services, advertising networks and social platforms.

To enable the “do not track” option in your browser follow the respective link below:

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Microsoft Edge
• Chrome
• Safari
• Opera

If your preferred browser is not in the above list of browsers, visit the vendor's website for more information.

When opening a page where Europa Analytics is enabled, the browsing experience is registered by the service. Simultaneously a dedicated banner may appear, giving you the possibility to accept or refuse cookies.

If you refuse cookies, you will also stop the Europa Analytics service. If you choose, though, to contribute your browsing experience on our websites as part of the anonymous statistics, you will enable us to significantly improve the performance of our communication, its outreach and its cost-efficiency.

If you have enabled the “Do not track” option in your web browser, we will respect your choice and your browsing experience on the Commission websites will not be processed by the service.

Choosing not to participate to the anonymised statistics of Europa Analytics does not affect your navigation experience on our sites. You can decide to withdraw or give your consent at any time. To see your current status and manage your consent, please check the corresponding box below:

All analytics data communication is encrypted via HTTPS protocol. The anonymised analytical reports generated by Europa Analytics can only be accessed through the European Commission Authentication System (ECAS) by the European institution staff or by duly authorised external sub-contractors, who may be required to analyse, develop and/or maintain certain sites.

Europa Analytics uses an IP de-identification mechanism that automatically masks a portion of each visitor's IP address, effectively making it impossible to identify a particular Europa visitor via the IP address.

Note that for statistical purposes the city and country of origin are determined from the full IP address, then stored and aggregated before the anonymisation mask is applied.

Europa Analytics automatically deletes the anonymous unaggregated data after 13 months.

Anonymous and aggregated data are stored for an indefinite period by the European Commission for analysis purposes.

Any specific question concerning the storage and use of Europa Analytics data can be sent via the contact form on europa.eu