Web beacons: advantages and disadvantages
Digital MarketingWeb beacons are implemented in web analytics typically as transparent 1-pixel-by-1-pixel images. By tracking how many times this web beacon is loaded, the webmaster can find out how many times the page was loaded and other key metrics such as IP address, cookie information, time the page was accessed, and more. Web beacons are also widely used in emails to track open rates.
Here are some benefits and drawbacks of using web beacons for web analytics.
Benefits:
Web beacons are easy to implement, mostly using just a simple HTML “IMG” tag. Most of the information processing is done on the server side.
Since most search bots don’t execute or load image requests, you can optimize your logs to just crawl and extract what you need to know about the visitor, without complex filters. This also reduces the size of your log files.
The same beacon can be used to collect information on different domains and websites. Since most of the processing is done on the “server” side, you can collect all the information on one server. Typical web statistics are only stored locally on the server where the domain is hosted.
Disadvantages:
Many newer email programs and even webmail clients have a feature to turn off images by default, and since the beacon is essentially an image, it won’t be able to track these visitors.
Beacons may collect less information about the user than custom JavaScript tags.
The typical installation of a beacon requires third-party cookies, which is increasingly affected by the strict default privacy settings in newer web browsers. Visitors with antispyware programs will also have these third-party cookies removed, making it difficult or impossible to track visitors.
Lastly, web beacons get a bad rap when it comes to the internet because they have been closely identified with browsing privacy issues.
In conclusion, if you want to quickly implement tracking visitor behavior across different sites and email open rates, web beacons can be useful. However, if you need richer information about your visitors, you’ll be better off implementing JavaScript tags used by many modern web analytics programs.