Web Tracking - Explained
What is Web Tracking?
Written by J. Mance Gordon
Updated at April 17th, 2024
- Marketing, Advertising, Sales & PR
- Accounting, Taxation, and Reporting
- Professionalism & Career Development
-
Law, Transactions, & Risk Management
Government, Legal System, Administrative Law, & Constitutional Law Legal Disputes - Civil & Criminal Law Agency Law HR, Employment, Labor, & Discrimination Business Entities, Corporate Governance & Ownership Business Transactions, Antitrust, & Securities Law Real Estate, Personal, & Intellectual Property Commercial Law: Contract, Payments, Security Interests, & Bankruptcy Consumer Protection Insurance & Risk Management Immigration Law Environmental Protection Law Inheritance, Estates, and Trusts
- Business Management & Operations
- Economics, Finance, & Analytics
What is Web Tracking?
People's online behavior is a really valuable source of information for marketers. We tracking is a method of tracking that behavior. Web tracking is just collecting and storing the online activity of individuals in order to better understand their behavior and their preferences.
So, by seeing where a person goes online, we can figure out what they might be more interested in or how to appeal to them regarding our product.
One way that we achieve this web tracking or the way that we go about web tracking is through what are called cookies.
Cookies are most noticeable when a website warns you that they use cookies. They are telling you that they are tracking where you're going on their website - as well as where else you're going on the internet once you're done on their website.
What are Cookies?
Cookies are the main way that we can engage in web tracking. It is worth noting that some search engines (mainly Google) have developed or are developing other unique ways of tracking consumer behavior on the internet.
Using Data from Web Tracking
So what do we do with the information from web tracking? Well, for one, as we've probably all experienced, sometimes somebody goes to a certain website or looks up a certain type of product. All of a sudden, an ad pops up for a particular brand of that product. That's the result of web tracking.
So, as marketers, what we can do with the information we get from web tracking? We can design and target specific ads to people based on their online behavior. That is the main goal of web tracking.
Related Topics
- Marketing Research Overview
- Quantitative and Qualitative Research
- Primary Research
- Secondary Research
- Determining the Right Marketing Strategy
- What is a Marketing Information System?
- What are Decision Support Systems?
- What are Marketing Models?
- What is a Marketing Dashboard?
- What Kinds of Data can we Use?
- Methods of Collecting Data
- What are Focus Groups?
- What is Group Think?
- What are Scanner Data?
- What is Web Tracking?
- What is Ethnography?
- What is Experimental` Research?
- What is Use of Statistics
- What Distorts the Results of Marketing Research?
- Challenges of International Market Research?