When selling products and services online it has become profitable because the majority of people started using the Internet. Many of the companies started viewing their online presence as one of the major ways to get exposure and to advertise their products and services. This includes both companies that focus on creating software products, such as Microsoft and brick-and-mortar businesses.
Many successful corporations spend tens and hundreds of mil
lions of dollars to advertise on their websites, on websites of other companies, on social networks and in emails that you opt-in to receive. These corporations want to know as much as possible about how you interact with their advertising and websites. They also want to know what you’ve been doing before you entered the website so that they can figure out how and when you started thinking about their products and services.
For this reason, they use all kinds of analytical tools. Such tools would usually insert a tiny image into a webpage. This image would have a script running behind it. The script would measure everything from how much time you’ve spent on a website to what pages you visited, to what links you clicked.