So it would seem that everyone is tracking me...

Not only do online advertising networks place cookies on your site that track your web activity, but practically every website you visit tracks you themselves and collects extremely detailed and informative data. Anything from the version of Flash installed on your computer to your location is collected and recorded. This practice is known as web analytics, and is common practice among websites today.

Tracking your visitors behavior is quite simple. Although there are hundreds of web tracking services available for free to website owners, Google Analytics is among the most used. I signed up for Google Analytics and placed the tracking code on this blog.



As you can see from the screenshot of my Analytics page, I have had 31 visits and 39 pageviews to this blog. Pageviews is a higher number because it accounts for repeat visits to the site.



As I stated before, web analytic software collects a vast amount of information about the visitor and his/her machine. I am able to see how many visitors use each Internet browser. This can prove beneficial to web designers. If they know what browser the majority of their visitors are using, they can create better webpages that take advantage of that particular browser's capabilities and create a better web surfing experience for their customer.

As I stated before, I had 31 visits to the blog, but nearly all of them were because I had friends and family visit this site for a few seconds merely to give a boost to my numbers. The majority of those visitors did not come to this blog becuase they were interested in the content, nor did they stay long enough to view any of it. The practice of creating "fake" visitors is known as click fraud.

Click fraud becomes an issue when organizations are paying to advertise one different websites. Where click fraud has been making news lately is on websites such as Google and Yahoo who offer pay-per-click programs to advertisers. A recent article in BusinessWeek discusses this issue and how advertisers are become less trusting of the glamorous pay-per-click programs that these sites tout. Advertisers are losing money because "entrepreneurs" are setting up click fraud rings that basically allow them to click multiple ads over a period of time having no intention in visiting the site they clicked or even receiving any information from it. When this happens, the advertiser ends up paying for the click. The advertiser loses money, while Google, Yahoo, and others make money as well as the one doing the clicking. Critics of Google and Yahoo say they are not doing enough to prevent this because they profit from this practice due to the fact that more advertisements are being clicked on, regardless of the intention of the one clicking it.

With all the web analytic software available today, Internet advertising networks should have the resources to ensure advertisers that their money will be well spent. I can only see them moving in that direction, since the invention of pay-per-click search marketing has been a gold mine for sites such as Google and Yahoo. To allow these programs to lose their appeal would be suicide.