Web beacons: advantages and disadvantages

Web beacons are generally implemented in web analytics as 1 pixel by 1 pixel transparent images. By tracking how many times this web beacon is loaded, the webmaster can find out how many times the page has been 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.

These are some of the benefits and disadvantages of using web beacons for web analytics.

Profits:

Web beacons are easy to implement, mostly using a simple HTML “IMG” tag. Most of the information processing is done on the server side.

Because most search bots don’t execute or load image requests, you can optimize your logs just to crawl and extract what you need to know about the visitor, without complex filtering. 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 so that images are disabled by default, and since the beacon is essentially an image, you will not be able to track these visitors.

Beacons can collect less information about the user than custom JavaScript tags.

The typical installation of a beacon requires third-party cookies, which are increasingly affected by the strict default privacy settings in newer web browsers. Visitors with anti-spyware 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 it has been closely identified with browsing privacy issues.

In conclusion, if you want to quickly implement visitor behavior tracking across different sites and email open rates, web beacons can be helpful. However, if you need more complete information about your visitors, it is better to implement JavaScript tags used by many of the modern web analytics programs.