Web beacon

A web beacon is a method that may be implemented on web pages and in emails to enable for the unobtrusive and, in most cases, invisible verification of whether or not a user has viewed certain material. In the context of online analytics and page tagging, third parties often make use of web beacons to monitor the activities of visitors on a website. This may be done for a variety of reasons. In addition to that, you may use them to trace emails. They may be referred to as JavaScript tags if they were to be implemented using JavaScript.

Companies and other organisations are able to monitor the activities of web users by using beacons of this kind. After some time, social networking websites also began to employ similar monitoring methods, for instance via the use of buttons that operate as tracking beacons. Initially, the firms who did such tracking were mostly advertisers or organisations that did web analytics.

In 2017, the W3C produced a proposed specification for an interface that web developers may use to generate web beacons. This interface can be used to track users' activity on websites.

One of the many methods that may be used to monitor the individuals who access a certain website is known as a web beacon. In addition, you may use them to check whether an e-mail has been read or forwarded, or if a web page has been transferred to another website.

The very first web beacons were embedded digital picture files that were very tiny in size. These files may be found on a website or in an email. The picture may be as tiny as a single pixel (referred to as a "tracking pixel") and could have the same colour as the backdrop, or it could be totally transparent. It is possible that a user will not see the embedded image when they open the page or email that contains the image; however, the image will be automatically downloaded by the user's web browser or email reader. This requires the user's computer to send a request to the server of the host company, which is where the source image is stored. This request supplies the host with identifying information about the user's machine, which enables the host to monitor the user's activity.

This fundamental approach has been refined further in order to allow for a greater variety of components to be used as beacons. At the moment, these can include not only visible elements like graphics, banners, or buttons, but also non-pictorial HTML elements like the frame, style, script, input link, embed, object, etc. of an email or web page. This is because HTML elements can now contain both visible and non-visible content.

The IP address of the user's computer, the time the request was made, the kind of web browser or email reader that made the request, and whether or not cookies were supplied by the host server in the past are all examples of the identifying information that are normally given by the user's computer. All of this information may be saved on the host server, where it may also be linked to a session identifier or tracking token that serves as an unmistakable signature for the transaction.