Anonymous User
Beginner PronunciationEN/əˈnɑːnɪməs ˈjuːzər/
An anonymous user is a visitor the analytics system recognises only by a device-level identifier, with no account identity attached to their events.
Anonymous does not mean untracked. The events are collected and stitched together; they simply are not tied to a name. On most public sites this population is the majority of traffic and the whole top of the funnel, so excluding it from reports removes exactly the stretch of the journey where acquisition decisions are made. The vocabulary also collides with data-protection law: a persistent random identifier makes the data pseudonymous, and pseudonymous data is still personal data.
FAQ
Usually not. As long as a persistent identifier links one person's behaviour over time, the data is pseudonymous, and regimes such as GDPR still treat it as personal data. True anonymisation requires removing or breaking that identifier.