What is tracking?

In online marketing, tracking refers to the recording of user behavior, i.e. which movements users make on the Internet, which is why it is also referred to as user or web tracking.

Tracking activities show, for example, from which internal websites, backlinks or advertisements visitors come to a website, which pages they go on to, which IP address is present and so on. Cookies, http headers or JavaScript are used for this, as well as tools such as Google Universal Analytics or Google Analytics 4.

Website tracking plays an important role in the following areas, among others:

UX / UI design
Designers can use factors such as scroll depth or the tracking of individual content elements, such as buttons, to adapt and therefore improve the user interface and user experience for visitors to a website.

Social media marketing
If social media ads are tracked or the channels from which visitors come to the website are tracked, this can also be used to improve the social media channels.

Search engine advertising (SEA)
As with social media ads, ads in Google Search, Display or on channels such as YouTube, Bing or Taboola can be tracked, evaluated and optimized. This means that tracking in the area of SEA, for example, allows organic traffic to be set in relation to paid traffic in order to improve campaign performance on the one hand and optimize individual landing pages on the other.

Search engine optimization (SEO)
In the area of search engine optimization, tracking can be used to understand which pages are visited frequently, how high the bounce rate is or how many transactions have been completed. By evaluating these figures, landing pages can be adapted, new websites created and content optimized.

Overall, tracking is therefore about analyzing and evaluating marketing measures and deriving appropriate methods for improvements and adjustments in order to adapt websites and campaigns to user behavior in the best possible way and thus, in the best case, convert interested parties into customers.

The following types of tracking are available to achieve this goal:

• Click Tracking
• event tracking
• Cross-device tracking