How Web Analytics Work

in web analytics. This is actually a really big topic, so I'm going to take a couple of episodes to cover it, and this first one we're gonna talk just about web analytics, what they are, why they are necessary in the web that we know and love today, And in the next episode, I'll go more into detail about the sort of data that they can gather are about you. So there's a lot to consider. Some of it gets a little technical, but we're gonna go light on that.

Will will explain what the technical aspects are, but we won't get too bogged down because it would involve talking about lines of code and that would get pretty awkward without visual aids. Uh. A lot of this can get a little scary because web analytics are valuable, and they really do chip away at your privacy. But let's start

from the top. What are web analytics. Well, at their most basic level, web analytics would be a collection of tools and strategies that allow people to collect and measure Internet data, specifically user generated Internet data, typically as a way to understand user behavior, and that is done so that the website owner can optimize experiences and leverage that user behavior in some way that ultimately corresponds to making money.

If I'm gonna be and entirely honest about this, it's all about figuring out how to make the most compelling experience to maximize the most return on an investment, that investment being the time, money, and effort you put in to creating a website. So this is not necessarily the owner of the website and might be the advertising company that brokers deals with various companies to place ads on websites.

But somewhere there's a person who's analyzing, or more likely a system that's analyzing this information in an effort to maximize that return. Now, in many ways, this is kind of following a long tradition that's been effective in meat space, you know, in the real world. If you go to a brick and mortar shop regularly, you've probably noticed that

sometimes stuff gets moved around the shop might reorganize. Most of the time, this is because the shop owners are trying to change things up in order to encourage more purchases. So grocery stores are a great example of this. The layout of your basic supermarket in the United States tends to be fairly standard. No matter what type of store you go to. It could be a Kroger or a Wegman's, or a Whole Foods or a Piggy Wiggly or a safe Way or whatever, they all tend to have a

similar layout. So you walk in, you probably will see flowers very frequently grocery stores and supermarkets. While flowers near the entrance, this sets a pleasant scene. It reminds people of freshness, bright colors. Behind that you typically find the produce that contains fruits and vegetables and vibrant colors, and that again engages your senses. It makes you think of

the food is being fresh. Over in the bakery section, you've got an area which typically creates a lot of very pleasing smells that will often make you feel hungry. That means that when you're hung greet you you tend to buy more than what you need. Right. So, if you've ever had this experience, you know what I'm talking about. You go into the grocery store, you've got a list, You've got three things on your list, You walk by that bakery. Next thing you know, you're in the checkoutline

with eight things in your cart. Instad of the three things that you had planned. Happens to the best of us, and it happens by design, by the design of the grocery stores. They people figure this out. They said, well, let's put this here because we'll make more sales. This has all been studied, by the way. I'm not just spit balling here. This is why grocery stores are laid

out the way they are. Uh. You also see this in various types of box stores where the big ticket, very popular items, maybe very far from the entrance that requires you to walk through the rest of the store in order to take a look at those things. These areas that have a high interest level, and the hope is that along the way you'll see something else that catches your eye and you'll pick that up. To Now, stores will experiment with where certain products should sit on shelves.

Sometimes you might display one product a shelf higher than what it was on before, and that's all it will take to move more units. Large chains might use certain stores as test sites and they'll work on a new layout configuration on this test site to see how well it plays out in that market before they make a decision about whether or not they'll roll it out to everybody else. This is essentially what we call a B testing.

So a B testing is something that you see in website design where you've got someone creating a website layout typically and they deploy that layout so that some users when they come to visit the site, see version A

of a website. Some users see version B, and then they analyze the behaviors of users on A versus B and see if there is a measurable difference in behaviors so that you can determine well, it turns out that version A people are not sticking around very long, the version B people are engaged much more with the content of the website. So this is a way of testing out different approaches, different design layouts in order to determine what is the most effective one. And it's the same

thing that we see in the real world. Uh, they scrutinize web ALEXA is scrutinized Internet user behavior to get a deeper understanding of what people want and what they like so that website designers and advertisers can tweak their approaches to tap into that and get the best result. That result might be to get people to subscribe to a service, to purchase products, to support a nonprofit, or just spend more time on the web page. So let's talk about how this might play out using actual web

pages as an example. And I'm going to use how Stuff Works dot Com as an example because I used to write articles for that site and I was in meetings where we were talking about site design and what was in iportant and the elements that we're going to go into play and how that was going to change things. And so I've seen a lot about the ways that people will analyze traffic data and try to use that

to help guide decisions for form and content. So How Stuff Works, like many websites, generates revenue from ads placed on the page. This is at the very heart of why web analytics are so important. It's because of the revenue model for making money on the web. The very hard and soul of that is web advertising. So ads can be based on a per click basis. That means the advertiser only pays the web page for the actual

number of clicks the ads generate. So if the ads do not get many clicks, the web page does not make very much money. There are other variations of this, but it's a general approach. There are things that you can do to help engage more clicks. The positioning of the ad on the web page but comes really important. But the other important element is making sure the ads

actually appealed to the site's users. If you have a fan page set up for a cartoon show, for example, and you show ads that are for a professional video conferencing service for medium to big businesses, that might not get very many clicks because the ads that you're displaying don't necessarily appeal to the audience coming to your website. Now, the other approach besides this per click basis is to have a fixed rate ad. Now, these ads have a set rate, as I just mentioned, and typically that is

defined as per impressions or page views. So if you hear people talk about impressions, they're really talking about how many times has a device loaded that page. That is an impression. The more page views a site gets, the more money it will make off the ads that are on those pages. And typically we measure this in the thousands using the unit CPS. That's cost per meal meal being one thousand m I L l E. So it's

not one million, it's one thousand. So if a website charges advertisers or rate of two dollars CPM, that means the advertiser will pay the publisher two dollars for every one thousand impressions or page views that page generates that has the ad on it. Right, So the ideas that well, we've we've shown that this page has been loaded one

thousand times. Uh, that means your ad has been viewed one thousand times on on various devices, not necessarily by one thousand people, because if you have a website that reloads frequently for some reason or another, then those uh, those impressions could represent fewer than a thousand people, but it would still be one thousand impressions you would get the two dollars. Page Views and people are two very

different things. If you can rack up a large number of page views with a limited number of people, that still counts towards CPM. And this is why so many web pages have things like quizzes or image galleries or slide shows. Each time the page refreshes to give you a new question or a new hilarious cat meme, that's an impression. That's a page view. So if you've ever gone to an article where it's not really an article, it's a slide show and you have to click next

after each thing. This is largely why because it's a way to engage the user to keep on clicking through and refreshing the page, and it's a way to generate those impressions. And the math is simple. Why would you create a web page with the top twenty comedy movies of all time and you put it all on one page so you get one impression per visitor when they come in to read your article. Or you could do the smart thing, you create a slide show, and you

could potentially get twenty page views per visitor. Now, not every visitor is going to stick around for all twenty items, but even if they only show up and bounce, like they see the first page and they see, oh, this is a slide show, I don't want to use this, and they go away, You're not gonna get fewer impressions than if they were all on the same page. Right.

If you attract ten thou people, let's say, to your one page version of the top twenty movies comedy movies of all time, and they read the whole thing, that's great. If you attract ten thousand to your slide show and eight thousand of them just look at that first page and they leave, but the other two thousand start clicking at least a little bit, You've generated more than ten thousand impressions. So it is a strategy that works, which

is why you see it out there now. I am not a huge fan of that particular type of web design from a user perspective, but from a business perspective, I totally get it. It's a page view manufacturing machine, and if the industry depends upon page views as a way of measuring engagement and therefore tied to revenue, then finding ways to maximize page views is always going to be a priority. It's not necessarily the quality of the interaction,

but the quantity the number of impressions. However, quality can matter too, and that's because websites have to first figure out how much do they charge for those CPMs. You know, I gave that two dollar figure, but that was just a random example. A site that can demonstrate that its users feel they're getting a really good quality experience can

typically demand much higher rates than other sites. If you have a lot of traffic coming to your website, and you can also demonstrate that the people who come to your website are really engaged, they really stick around. They often will explore the website or stay on pages for a very long time. That shows that you have a higher value you then a website that might get a lot of people coming in, but then immediately they leave. So this ties into a concept called bounce rate I

mentioned bounce earlier. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who leave or bounce after viewing just one page, like a landing page or a home page. You want your bounce rate to be really low because you want visitors to be engaged in your site. You want them to not just come to the landing page, but maybe click on some of the links that go to other pages in your website, and it shows that your site

has value. Plus, chances are you want people engage because you put a lot of work into a website, and it would be depressing if no one ever went beyond a single page view. You know, why would you go through the trouble of designing a fully engrossing website when everyone just comes to one page on that site and then they say, no, I'm out of here. That would be really upsetting. And so a low bounce rate tends

to look really good to advertise. There's this is a signal that says users value their time here, and so you're advertising will be featured on a really good website. And again, another important quantity to measure is the amount of time people will spend on a web page. Do you want that number to be high so you want the bounce right to be low. The amount of time spent on a web page to be high. That shows people are spending more time on your service. That's attractive

to advertisers. It's a great way to demand higher CPM rates if you can demonstrate that users come to your site and spend a lot of time there. For one thing that tells advertisers your site is a good spot to reach people. If the time spent on your pages is low. That might tell advertisers, hey, you know, maybe don't put ads here because no one is spending enough time on an individual page to even register that there

is an ad. If the average time spent on a page on your site is half a minute or less and you have lots of long articles, that indicates that most users aren't actually reading the content you've created, and that is not a good thing. So you want your once right low. You want the amount of time you spent spent on an individual page on your site to be high, and that will keep advertisers interested in your site as a place where ads may be most effective.

Beyond that, knowing that your users like one thing over another in general is really helpful because it can help you match up advertisers that are most appropriate for your demographic. Again, let's going back to that fictional fan page I talked about creating a fan site for a cartoon show. Let's say you've done that and you've got great engagement, You've got a really low bounce rate. People are spending a good amount of time on your page and they're exploring

the various links on there. Then maybe you reach out and you find an online store that sells merchandise related to the show that your site is a fan site of. That's a no brainer. That's a perfect relationship, and you could probably demand decent CPMs for that, and ideally everyone benefits. The advertiser gets a good spot to show ads, visitors to the website have the opportunity to purchase merchandise related to the show they love, you earn money from the impressions.

That's the idea. So generally speaking, it's not the worst thing in the world, right this web analytics. It's the idea of not just the advertising part, although that plays a big part of this, but also what do my users like? And how can I make my website more of what my users like? How can I get rid of stuff they don't like? How can I emphasize stuff they do like and make a better experience so that the work I put in is rewarded and I feel good about what I've done, right, Like, I feel a

sense of accomplishment because I've created something that people value. Uh, It's a very powerful feeling. Now, I got a lot more to say about web analytics, but before I get into any more of that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Right to actually measure stuff like bounce rate, time spent on pages, user preferences. We rely on web analytics, and there are companies that specialize in

providing web analytics tools. Google is one of the big ones. Uh. These services provide a ton of information to website owners to help them keep an eye on how things are going and how to react nimbly when an opportunity or a crisis arises. The web analysis depends not only on tools, but also some assumptions, and one of those assumptions is intent. When you look at an analysis, you are assuming that the behavior you're studying was intentional. So let's say again,

let's let's start with how stuffworks dot com. That site has a lot of individual pages, hundreds hundreds of pages. There are thousands of articles about all sorts of different subjects, from technology to culture, to finance, everything else. There's a

home page which features links to new articles. There's probably older articles up there that are maybe timely because of something that's going on in the news, or maybe there's some classic articles that are mixed in because they've consistently performed well over time, so they're they're dependable whatever the case. There are several links on the homepage that go directly to articles, so you click on that and you're in an article. There are also links that go to channel pages.

These are broader categories of topics like computers or electronics, so you can click on that and go to the homepage for that channel. And then there's also a search engine tool so that you can actually search for articles about a specific topic. If there's something you have in mind. Now, when you're analyzing web traffic across the site, you want

to take close look at all the behavior. You want to see how many people clicked into an article from the homepage versus going through a channel link, like something that was linked through going through one of those channel landing pages or using a search engine. You want to see how many people clicked into an article from an external search engine, or maybe a piece of content somewhere else on the web, something that's not on one of your web pages but is linked from someone else's to

your site, or from a social media platform. There might be social media marketing campaigns that you're running, and you want to include a little string of data that will let you know if someone's clicking into that article from say Twitter or Facebook. All of that is valuable information and it helps you figure out how were your well your design works. So if most of your traffic is coming in through search, it means you perform well when

people search stuff in in engines like Google. Like they're looking for a topic in Google and your site is popping up. That's great, Hey, you've got great seo. Your website is is up in the first few uh selections in a search engine. And we know from research that if you are on the first page, you have a lot better chance of having someone click on your length than if you're buried down on page three or lower. Now, a lot of people don't go past the second page

if they don't see what they're looking for. But if that's the case, if most of your traffic is coming in through search, that might indicate that your homepage is not really a popular spot for people to visit just on their own. So that might mean you should look into a redesign for your homepage to attract more visitors to say, this is a website you want to check regularly, not just come here when you are searching for something, and we happen to have what it is you're searching for.

But no matter what conclusions you draw from this data, you're doing it based on the assumption that the users intended to navigate to those links, Whether they did so through a search engine, a link on another site, or through the home page. Your analysis depends upon that assumption. So if people ended up on your site by chance, by mistake, that doesn't tell you anything other than there may be links to your site that are misleading or

easy to click on by accident. Um. I'm reminded of a lot of older web advertisements that were pop over ads that would suddenly show up in front of your view on a website, and it was very easy to accidentally click on one while you were looking at a website, because it would pop up just as you were about to click on something else, and you would navigate to whatever the ad linked you to. Well, that's not an intentional click. That's that's like a shell game. It's smoke

and mirrors. It's it's tricking you, scamming you into clicking, not to fool you or not to convince you to buy anything, but because that makes it look really good to your clients. Right, if you are a company that that places ads on stuff and you can turn to a potential client and say, here's the number of clicks that are last campaign generated. Look how how popular it was, and you just leave out the little detail that most of those clicks were gathered by subterviews. Then you might

be able to land the juicy contract. It's not very ethical, but it did happen quite a bit. Doesn't happen so much in that format anymore. I'm sure it happens like crazy and other formats still, So accidental traffic might count the same as intentional when you're looking at number of impressions, but it's not exactly a healthy business strategy because your bounce rate is going to be super high, your time

spent on a website it's gonna be super low. That people are going to associate the destination they went to as an untrustworthy source, So it is a losing game in the long run. So intention is a very important concept in web analysis, particularly when you pair that concept with other behaviors. So if you see a lot of people are clicking into an article from the home page of how Stuff Works, but then you see the bounce rate on the article is very high, and the time

spent on the article is very low. It indicates that what you've got it that link is not meeting the expectation of visitors. Right they see a headline, they click on it, they immediately back out or navigate away. That tells you something is going wrong there. Either the article is not a very good one, or the link was misleading.

Maybe the headline wasn't really appropriate for whatever the article was, or maybe it gave mistaken impression that the content was going to be in some other factor form factor like video or audio. Uh So, if you if you work from the assumption that the user intended to click on the link and then went to the new page, but they didn't like what they saw, it tells you, well,

I need to fix this. Maybe I need to change that headline, or maybe I need to uh make more clear what it is this is so that people don't click on it and then just bounce away because that doesn't look good either. So, using a different example, let's say I'm looking at data from how stuff Works dot com and I have an article there titled will Artificial

Intelligence Eliminate Your job? Right there on the home page, And I'm looking at the traffic and I see a lot of people are clicking on that link, but once they get there, they either search for something in the search engine or they back out the article. Now, that could mean the users are not seeing what they expected

and the article title maybe isn't appropriate. On the other hand, if I see the bounce rate is low and the time spent on the page is a good amount, I can assume this is an article that's really engaging and interesting, and I might want to give it an even more prominent placement on the home page to help drive more traffic.

If I see this is performing really well, let me put it on the heroes spot on a carousel so that it's the first thing people see when they load up the home page and drive even more traffic to it. Or I might want to make sure that I include

the article in the layout the following day. Right, So if I have a carousel or slide show type display for articles, I might say, all right, well, I'm not gonna put it in the first spot because now it's a day old, but I will put it in spot two or three because there's still a good amount of traffic coming into this article. There's a tail to it. That's what we call the long tail, where you create content that continues to have relevance after you've posted it.

Or maybe a visitor clicks on the homepage and then types in the search engine Turing test because they've been inspired by this AI article title, but they're more interested in learning about Alan Turing's proposed intelligence test, not about whether or not AI is going to take their job. And because they use the search engine, I might conclude that my homepage doesn't have great navigational tools that will

lead users to content they want to see. If I did have really good navigational tools, then maybe the user would see three or four articles that he or she is interested in within that same subject. You know, they click on a link that would take them to artificial intelligence topics, and they might read several articles, and that's going to benefit both the user and me. A search result will pull up one article, presumably the the article

that's most relevant to the search terms. Navigation will offer up a lot more. Now that being said, personally, I often will use search because it gets me to what I want a lot faster than just navigating through a user interface. I do it for efficiency, but that's something that web page designers try to work around to encourage engagement. Or let's say that I've given prime position to my AI article on the homepage. All right, it's got a really good spot on there, but I see that way

more people are clicking on a totally different article. Uh. We'll say it's taking the perfect Instagram photo of your food, and that article is performing way better than the AI r article. But that article is also featured lower down on the homepage, below the fold, as we would say, which means it's the point where you would have to actually scroll down but beyond the initial homepage view to

actually see a link to that. Uh. We usually want to put the stuff that is really relevant and interesting and popular above the fold to make it easier for people to see. So that would tell me people are not as interested in the AI article as they are in the Instagram article, and I should probably swap those two out so that the more popular one that has a more prominent place and generates more traffic. So how do we get that data right? How do we actually

know what people are doing? Websites tend to have a special file called an access log, and this log collects raw data about user behavior across a website. An access log is essentially a list of all the files that users have requested from a website. So remember when you visit a website, it means your computer is actually sending out a request. This is activated through some interaction you have with your web browsers, So you type in a web address, you click on a link. Either of those

is technically a request. It gets sent out over the Internet and it shoots over to the appropriate computer system that houses those files. That computer processes the request and response to it, shooting that file back to you in the form of data packets which arrive at your computer, get reassembled, and then in your web browser it gets displayed as a web page. So for a web page, that would be probably an HTML file and all the associated files that go along with it, like embedded images

or other media. The access log keeps count of all those requests across all the pages on a site. Now, that can be a lot of data, particularly for a really big website. So typically to make sense of all of that, you would need another program to kind of sort through all the information and put it into a format that's more easily understood. But access logs are usually a little limited in the information they can tell you. They can tell you certain types of information, but not

all the granular stuff. Uh. Information it can tell you might include things like the number of unique visitors you have, which is uh uh. Which requests represent different devices versus those that are linked to a single device. That's what we mean by unique visitors. It doesn't again, doesn't necessarily mean unique people. It could be the same person using ten thousand different devices to access your website. That would

still be unique visitors because it would all be different devices. Uh. The access log might also tell you where the visitors associated servers domain name is, like whether the visitors navigating from the dot E, d U or dot com or dot gov site, or which online service provider the user is using, which I s P they are using. The access log can tell you which pages on a site are getting the most requests. That essentially tells you which

pages are the most popular across your website. It might tell you what times of day or week, or month or even year are the most popular to visit your website. You can look at trends in data this way, so you might see that a lot of people, say, are visiting your site in the morning and fewer are visiting it in the afternoon, so you might want to make sure that you have the fresh content up in the

mornings so that people are energized to get there. And maybe you even experiment, maybe you try and put up a second round of new content in the afternoons to see if you can encourage more visitors in the afternoons. But again, if you have a really big website with lots of pages, this approach can get a little unmanageable. But there are other ways to get data from users, and I'm going to go into that in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors.

An alternative to using access logs is using some code in JavaScript now. JavaScript is a coding language primarily used for web development. Netscape created JavaScript in order to build out interactive, dynamic elements in websites, so you didn't just have static pages that you never changed and therefore there was not really any reason to keep visiting them. It's

not actually related to the Java programming language directly. It did take some inspiration from Java, but JavaScript really resembles the c programming language more than Java, and it's a client side scripting language. That means your browser processes the code rather than the web server. So we have server side and we have client side. JavaScript is client side

JavaScript tracking involves inserting some JavaScript code into a web page. Typically, this code will send tracking information to an analytics service like Google Analytics, and this gives the service the ability to track specific behaviors on web pages that include that JavaScript code, including targeted ones that you want to pay very close attention to targeted behaviors. Um. For this to work, the web designer has to include this code on every web page on his or her site that they want

to track. So when a user visits a web page, the user's browser executes the code in JavaScript. Assuming the user doesn't have JavaScript turned off. You can turn off JavaScript, so if you did that then this step would not happen. But when it does happen, it sends what is called an API called to the server to send data to that server. This type of data is dependent upon the code in that JavaScript code and the analysis engine that

you are using. So if a web developer is only interested in where a user is coming from, where that user is going, and how long they are, you know where they went to after they were on your site and how long they were spending on your website. You could tweak your JavaScript to only collect that information if you wanted to. But as for where you're coming from, it can get a little more granular, in fact, a lot more granular than just whether it's a dot com

or dot e du or dot gov. For example, you may have seen links to sites from their official social media feeds that contain some characters after the HTM tag at the end of the u r L. Those characters are codes. They give more information about how the user navigated to that page. The web server can't make any sense of this information and ignores it. So like when your web browser asks for that page, the server looks at everything that's after HTM and says, this doesn't make

any sense to me. Just send them the website and they will. But the JavaScript code can see that tag and link your visit with the associated social platform links. So when you get all the information sent off to the analytics company, they can return a report that says X percent of your visitors to this particular article got there through Facebook, why percent got there from Twitter, and z percent came from your homepage, and you know, maybe

a percent came from search. You can get it broken down in all these different ways, so you can really see where people are coming in, how they are discovering your your content, and that gives you ideas of where you should spend your efforts promoting your site. And if you see that hardly anyone is coming to your site from Facebook, it probably means that your links aren't really visible to a lot of people. They're not popping up

in a lot of news feeds. Facebook is famous for tweaking its format several times uh and uh and changing things out where you'll hear companies say, like especially content companies say, Facebook change their algorithms and now we are our traffic has dropped incredibly low because we can't get our links out in front of people the way we

used to. Uh. This lesson, by the way, I think is that you should never really commit fully to any one social platform as your primary way of reaching potential visitors, because as you have no control over whether or not that platform will change things, and if they do change things, it can it can really hurt you. It's a tough lesson to learn. Now that might mean that you would

have to figure out some other strategy. You might have to pay Facebook for a promotion so that your your links get promoted in more news feeds and then you might get a little more traffic. Or it might mean you just have to use a totally different approach to try and reach other users. Um, it's it's a tough it's a tough situation to be in. JavaScript can also track user interactions like downloads as well, so if there is downloadable content on a web page, it's possible for

the web administrator to track all that. You can also look at user settings like browser resolutions. You can look for browser plug ins. If you've ever used an ad blocking program and you've wondered how a website can detect that, and it sends you a message saying, hey, we see your blocking ads. Would you mind you know, not doing that? That could come from a JavaScript code and the web page.

The JavaScript is able to tell that you've gotten ad blocker installed, and it triggers this server to send you the message to turn off that ad blocker if you want to access the content. JavaScript can identify unique visitors by analyzing cookies and the browsers quote unquote fingerprint. So what exactly are cookies? I'm sure you heard about Internet cookies. Well, those are special little data packets that your browser will send to web servers when you visit a website. Uh,

they can get installed on your web browser. Because you visit a web page, it installs a cookie on your web browser, and then every time you come back, it registers that it's you that you've done this. Uh. This is actually a pretty valuable thing. It means that when you go to a website, it can register that you

are a return visitor. And let's say you're using a service frequently and you log into that service, like you have to have a user name and password, Well, the cookie might out so that the service recognizes when you're navigating back to that service, so you don't have to do the log in all over again. It has already registered that you are you and you're fine, or maybe you are watching a video or listening to some music or something you navigate away. When you navigate back, it

could pick up right where you left off. Because there was a cookie that was installed on your browser, it was able to register when you stopped watching or listening to something, and then when you return, it recognizes where who you are and then goes right back to the point where you left off. Cookies are what make that possible.

But those data packets can send other types of information to servers, like which pages you have recently visited, or which ones you go to frequently, or topics you might have searched for in the past. And that information is valuable because it not only tells web administrators more about user behavior, it can also be a really valuable tool for marketing and advertising companies. This is where targeting advertising

comes into play. So again, uh, in an ideal implementation, one where everybody benefits, targeted advertising would mean you would see ads for stuff you were already interested in. You would not see ads for stuff that did not pertain to you. The advertisers would quote unquote know what you are interested in because of web analytics and cookies and

that kind of thing. The data your computer is sending servers gives little bits of information about your interests and desires, and if it all works properly and everyone's on the up and up, the advertiser sends adds that you're most likely to find valuable, and that means that you might see an ad that you are legitimately interested in you actually want to buy that product or service, so you end up doing that because you were informed by that

ad and everybody's a winner. The web content providers a winner, the advertisers a winner, the company you bought the service or product for as a winner, and you're a winner because you all got what you wanted and it's all done without your actual identity being part of that equation. The web analytics company doesn't care who you are. They care about what you like, so you're a user, a website visitor. The advertiser just doesn't have any desire to

go beyond that. They just want to know what they can serve to you that will most UH entice you to engage with content and with advertising. That's the ideal implementation, but as we know, we do not live in an ideal world. Now, you can elect to block JavaScript, and you can block cookies that will prevent your browser from sending information to web servers in the ways i've described.

The web access logs will still register when you visit a site, not you specifically, but rather that the site is UH is one among all the others you've hit that day. Now, before I conclude this episode, I want to stress that web analytics are gitimate and they are valuable. They help website administrators create better sites that people want to go to. They help content companies make sure they're

creating the stuff people want to see. Uh. They help online retailers market their products more effectively so that people find what they're looking for more easily. They can improve the experience for all sides of the equation if they are used responsibly. But in our next episode, I'll look at how things can go wrong when we aren't careful. That wraps up this overview of web analytics and a little bit of online advertising, and to explain why it's important.

In our next episode, we'll talk more about privacy issues and security issues. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff rex dot com or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget check out t public dot com slash tech stuff

for all your tech stuff merchandise needs. Speaking of targeted advertise, UH, go get yourself a coffee mug or a T shirt or some stickers, and don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com