How Facebook and Google Track Your Online Behavior
Facebook and Google are the two most popular websites in the world for news sites, marketers, and everyone else in the business of trying to get folks to consume content or make purchases online. If you read a news article today, chances are one of these two sites played a role in it ending up in front of your eyes. According to Parse.ly, nearly 80% of external referral traffic to digital publishers in the past 12 months has come from Facebook or Google.
So, what do Facebook and Google get out of this? Data. Specifically, your data. When you click a link on Facebook or search for a product on Google, these sites analyze your behavior — even after you’ve left those sites and are several clicks along on your Internet journey. This information is then a valuable commodity for marketers looking to get their content or products in front of people who are more likely to be interested. As someone who used to manage Audience Development and Social Media for digital publishers and is now a software engineer, I thought it would be interesting to look at the software that allows Facebook and Google so much…
