The £500 figure is significant — this article by Jolyon Maugham explains why better than I can, so I won’t go into too much detail. Suffice to say the rule is that you have to collect a lot more information on your donor and follow stricter guidelines when accepting donations over £500.

My understanding is that the allowance is per person — this would make sense, as otherwise a rich individual could play the system by making multiple £500 donations.

So if you know or strongly suspect that two £500 donations came from the same person, you should probably treat them as a £1,000 donation.

With me so far? Good.

Now, with my digital marketing hat on, when I read about this I thought — surely it would be easy to identify whether donations are coming from the same person or group of people in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free data tool which millions of website owners use. Essentially, it tracks your users’ journey through your website, so you can see when they perform the actions which the website is built to guide them towards, such as filling out a contact form, buying a product or, say, clicking a donation button.

GA’s become really powerful in the past few years and has a number of third party integrations which mean you can track users’ activity even when they move over from your own site on to your Ebay or Eventbrite page — or your Paypal account.

One of the things which GA can do is tell whether a user is ‘new’ or ‘returning’. It can map this against sales actions to tell you how many of your buyers online are new business and how many are returning custom. It can even tell how much the sale was worth.

Or, if you’re taking donations, it can record whether those donations were from the same person(s) and what the total value was.

It’s standard to have at least one of these tracking tools on your site. It’s basic.

For example, go to Conservatives.com, jump into the source files and you’ll see:

But here’s the thing — I can’t find GA or any equivalent tracking platform on the Brexit Party website. Not a sausage.

The only stats script I can see is from stats.wp.com which measures very basic numbers on views, comments etc, but nothing like the detail which you get from GA.

This is quite puzzling.

(Now before we get any further with this line of thinking, here’s a health warning: I am not a website developer. I work in marketing and have an incomplete knowledge of coding — I know enough to do my job and that is it.

So Occam’s Razor would suggest that the more likely explanation here is that the Brexit Party’s website DOES have GA or equivalent on it and that I’m simply too dumb to find it.

If anyone with better coding knowledge than me can take a look at the source code of the Brexit Party’s website and see if they can spot any tracking pixels or scripts which might be gathering user data, I’d love to know.)

Anyway, assuming that I’m right about the Brexit Party not having a proper web stats platform, so what? This is from the people who gave us UKIP — they probably just don’t know how to run a website, no?

Well, funny thing there. See there’s plenty of other stuff on the party’s website which is quite advanced by comparison to a bog-standard GA installation. For example the Facebook tracking script is on there, allowing them to target FB ads to visitors of the site.

The Google Marketing Platform script (sometimes referred to as DoubleClick) is on there too, allowing them to target Google Ads.

The presence of these scripts isn’t itself unusual — again, lots of marketers and political parties use them.

But what is unusual, in my personal opinion, is that the Brexit Party has these intermediate level targeting tools yet no standard web analytics tool to go alongside them.

There could be an entirely legitimate reason for that — such as data protection compliance. It would be taking speculation to the extreme to say that they’ve done this deliberately for a particular purpose.

But what it does mean is that they probably can’t track returning visitors on the site, or track the total value of donations from a user or group of users.

Assuming I’m right about that, then if the investigation Gordon Brown has called for happens, the Brexit Party couldn’t be ordered to hand over such data on its online donors, because it doesn’t actually hold that information.

If I’m wrong, then happy days, because it means that information is available and the relevant authorities could presumably compel the Brexit Party to disclose it.