Who Has Data on Your Site?

November 18, 2009 Michelle Anderson — 0 comments

Guest Post from Curtis Smith

This post is about the different types of data tracking software for web sites and how to tell your web site is being tracked. It was written by Curtis Smith, Webtrends’ Technical Account Manager. Curtis spends his day assisting Webtrends customers manage the health and flow of their web site analytics data.

Who is tracking your site? And what are they doing with the data? If you are reading this you probably answered “Webtrends, so I can get useful metrics on my site that help my business”. But are you sure that this is the only one? I am not talking about spyware, but tracking placed on your site for (not necessarily your) business purposes.

My job as a TAM (Technical Account Manager) is helping customers tag sites, configure profiles, and create reports. For those unfamiliar with the Webtrends TAM service this is sort of a combined consultant, admin, and analytics expert that you contract for a period of time rather than per project. But what does this have to do with who has your site data?

I got a request from a company who wanted to get more information on their social marketing efforts, starting with a series of Blogs. We were developing a strategy to track a long list of blogs done by their employees. Some were hosted on their company site but many were hosted on various other sites and platforms including personal domains.

What surprised me was the variety of tracking already implemented on the sites. Much of which I doubt the site owners knew about. I am not taking about spyware but actual tracking tags embedded in the page code that send data about their site somewhere else. Tracking included:

Tracking from the CMS software
Google tags, some of which seemed to be dropped in with other sections of code
Hosted blog site tracking (e.g. blogengine.com)
Site Host tags (You’d think that server hosts would do server side, not page based tracking)
Tracking implemented by, with data going to, a consulting company who built the site
Ad tracking tags

In some cases there were already 2 to 3 tracking tags on the site – before the Webtrends tag was added! Are you sure these types of tags aren’t on your site?

Is a site developer/hosting service/IT staff/banner ad/CMS software/etc. tracking your site for “quality control”? Where is this data going? Is your marketing data going to someone outside your company? Are they open about what they are doing with the data? Is it even your data even though it is coming from your site?

Ways to tell if your site is being tracked:

Use a tool such as HttpWatch or Fiddler. These track requests coming from page loads. Watch for Post and GET requests to domains other than yours. This means data is going somewhere besides your domain.
It is often easy to copy and paste a convenient function without realizing you are including a tracking code. When implementing outside code watch for calls using 1×1 transparent GIF files. This is a common method of sending tracking methods using an image not visible on your page.
Check if your host and CMS have built in tracking and if so what information is being tracked and where does it go.
If you have outside content on your site (e.g. a frame with ads) find out what they are tracking. Is it just ad response or is it including data on your site.

Even for your main site tracking – where does the data go? Can you see it or does it go into an unknown pool that you can pull some reports from. Do you have access to all the data being taken on your site? Who else has access to your data?

Some people worry about Big Brother watching them. While most of the companies that put tags on the sites were probably meaning well (“Let’s see how people are using our CMS product!”). They seemed more like a little brother. Not a benevolent “Watching you for your own protection” big brother. But the kid brother hiding behind the couch when his older sister brings home her new boyfriend – just to see if he can hear anything of interest. Occasionally, check behind the couch.

CATEGORIES: Best Practices Customer Experience