Custom Domains
Serve the Ours Privacy SDK from your own domain so cookies are set first-party, server-side, and survive browser tracking-prevention rules.
Custom Domains
A custom domain serves the Ours Privacy SDK from a subdomain you own (e.g. metrics.yourdomain.com) instead of from oursprivacy.com. This unlocks the most important property a tracking setup can have: cookies set server-side, on your own domain.
Why this matters: server-side first-party cookies
When the SDK runs on oursprivacy.com, the browser treats its cookies as third-party — and modern browsers aggressively limit those.
With a custom domain, the cookie is written by the server in the HTTP Set-Cookie header from your own domain. That single change means the cookie is:
- First-party. Cookies live on your own server, not on a different company's URL — improving the security posture of the data and avoiding tracking-prevention rules that target third-party hosts, including Safari's ITP 7-day cap on JavaScript-written cookies.
- Resilient. Fewer requests blocked by content blockers and ad-blocker DNS lists, less tracker interference on page load.
- Persistent. Visitor identity sticks around the way you'd expect across sessions, instead of looking like a new anonymous visitor every week or two.
In practice this is the difference between a visitor who looks like a returning user three weeks later and one who looks like a brand new anonymous session.
Other benefits
- Stricter CSP. A Content Security Policy is the browser-level allow-list that controls which hosts your site is permitted to load scripts and make requests to — it's one of the most effective defenses against XSS and supply-chain attacks. With a custom domain you can lock your CSP down to your own host instead of allow-listing a third-party one.
- Performance. First-party requests aren't slowed or blocked by tracker-interference heuristics.
- Compliance posture. Data is collected on infrastructure you point to, under your domain's privacy policy.
Setup
Setup happens in the dashboard, not in docs — the app generates a CNAME value that's specific to your account and watches DNS + certificate status as it propagates.
- In the Ours Privacy dashboard, open Custom Domains and click Get Started.
- Add the CNAME record shown to your DNS provider. There's only one —
metrics.yourdomain.com→ the value displayed in the app. - Wait a few minutes. The page auto-refreshes through Awaiting DNS → Validating → Ready.
- Once Ready, copy the install snippet from the app and add it to your site's
<head>.
That's the full setup. If you're using the Web SDK directly, pass your custom domain when initializing:
ours('init', '<your token>', {
custom_domain: 'https://metrics.yourdomain.com',
});See the Web SDK reference for the full init API.
Also works with
Once your custom domain is live, it serves more than the Web SDK:
- 1-pixel image tracking — pixel URLs work on your custom domain.
- Redirect tracking — redirect URLs work on your custom domain.
Same host, same cookies, same identity.
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