How is Consumer Data Collected?

How is Consumer Data Collected?

Marketers use different types of data to measure different outcomes. Traffic data is the number of visitors and views that a website collects. Audience data maps pathways of how consumers discover the website and further actions. Campaign data explains the results of specific marketing efforts (Roberts & Zahay, 2013). There are several ways for marketers to collect this data such as hit counters, server request log files, tagged pages, cookies, and .

Hit counters are a simple tracking tool that is added to websites to collect data. Hit counters are either built into the HTML code or added later and may be visible on the web page or not (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Server request logs are comprised of extensive data pertaining to the clicks a website receives. Anytime an image, text, or other web area is clicked, then the server documents this.The data shared with website owners generally includes the IP address that requested the website, date, time, a successful transaction code, number of bytes, website browser info, and operating system (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Tagged web pages refer to code that is added to a webpage that tracks even more data than server request logs. This code traces a consumer’s steps as he/she navigates each page of the website. The consumer information that tagged web pages provide is entry and exits pages, geographic data, time, date, platform, and browser info. Marketers can obtain metric data such as number of visitors and repeat visitors, the number of visits, length of the visit, and total time (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Cookies are set to collect personal or anonymous data. Cookies are data files that send information from a consumer’s computer and sends data back to a server. Session cookies only report data from one individual session. Persistent cookies collect data until a set time when they expire. Outsider metric- gathering services use third-party cookies, while the website sets first-party cookies (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

References

Roberts, M. L. & Zahay, D. (2013). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies (3rd ed.). Retrieved from https://redshelf.com