Platform
First-party capture
The base layer of DataCops. One script, loaded from your own domain through a single DNS record, captures every visit and conversion as first-party, so nothing treats it as an outside tracker and the data everyone else loses is yours.
What it is
First-party capture means the DataCops script is served from a subdomain of your own domain, like datacops.yourstore.com, over its own valid certificate, and captures visits and conversions from there. To the browser it is part of your own site, not a third-party tracker, so ad blockers, Safari, and Brave do not strip it. This is the foundation every other part of DataCops sits on: if the capture is first-party, everything downstream can count the whole audience.Why third-party capture loses data
A normal pixel is captured from someone else's domain, one shared across thousands of sites. Browsers treat that as an outsider. Ad blockers match it against lists of known third-party tracker domains and remove it. Safari and Brave limit its storage as cross-site tracking. And a visitor who rejects cookies removes it too. So a large share of your real traffic is never captured at all, and you have no way to know how big the missing part is.
Set it up
First-party capture is a no-code setup and takes two steps: paste one script tag in your <head>, and add one DNS record so the script loads from your own domain. The exact script tag and the CNAME record are in the developer guide.
What it captures
Once it is first-party, the script captures the whole visit on the page: the ad click the visitor arrived on, the pages they view, the forms they submit, the buttons they click, and the shape of their behaviour. Every piece is tied to one durable identity and passed through the fraud verdict before it counts, so what you capture is a real person with a history, not a scattered set of hits.
How the page-level capture works → ยท How the visitor is remembered →
First-party vs server-side capture
DataCops captures in two layers, and they work together. They are not the same thing, and they are not either-or.
- First-party capture is the base. The script on your own domain captures the visit from inside the page. It works for every visitor and is the one thing you always turn on.
- Server-side capture is the advanced, optional layer. An edge worker runs before the page even loads and grabs the ad click the instant the visitor lands, before the fastest bounces and the strictest browsers can strip it. It pairs with first-party capture to recover the last slice that a page script alone would miss.
Use first-party capture always. Add server-side capture when you want the maximum recovery of ad clicks. Together they make sure nothing real is lost, whether the visitor stays for a second or a session.
Shopify stores
Shopify storefront pages get first-party capture the same way. Once your own domain, not the free myshopify.com address, is verified in DataCops, the storefront automatically loads the script from your own domain instead of the shared one. No extra step inside Shopify.
Checkout is the one page Shopify keeps sandboxed for everyone, so no script runs there. That is fine: the purchase is captured server-side through Shopify's order notification, so the sale is still counted, ad click and all.