Often I click on a video link to see something, and I’m met with an ad first. If I’m not that interested, I usually close the tab or browser. Can the hosting site detect that I’ve done so and possibly infer that the ad has annoyed me? If they can do it does anyone have any insight as to whether they actually check on such things?
Yes. Web analytics will show how much time a user spent on your site and on each page. Some sites will try what is called A/B testing and show the ad to some people and not others and see how it affects people staying or leaving. Other sites will just look at the number of people who clicked on or followed through with the ad and decide if that number is worth continuing the ad, regardless of who may have been turned off by the ad.
If you click on a link and then leave it without doing anything else (or at least navigating to another page on the same site), that counts as a ‘bounce’. “Bounce rate”, the percentage of people that leave after visiting only the first page they landed on, is a very common item to track.
It’s also trivial to track how long the person was on your site, where they came from and where they go after.
Google Analytics makes this all very easy to track.
TL;DR: Yes, they can tell if you go to their site and immediately leave.
I’ve opened a webpage, decided I didn’t like how annoying it is and went to close the tab or close the window entirely. And as I’m moving the cursor to the upper right hand corner, something will pop up to say, “Wait! Before you go . . .” This is more than telling that I left the page quickly.
Ad-blocker, ad-blocker, ad-blocker! Don’t browse without one.
uBlock origin is the best one to use. It’s available (free) for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.
Make sure you get uBlock Origin, not something from uBlock.org – that is a fake site, owned by AdBlock. And watch out for ad-Block, too. That is a once-good ad blocker that has gone over to the dark side – they now let advertising companies pay to allow their ads through QAdBlocker.
I’m not up to speed on everything that AdBlock does, but it does let through a few very harmless ads on very few websites that choose to serve the curated ads that AdBlock has deemed to be completely inoffensive. The main problem with modern ads for me is that they take up system resources without my permission. Banner ads require very little in computer resources.
Can the tracking tell whether the tab is active? Eg if I open the window, then click another tab leaving the ad or whatever playing in the background - does that count as an active visiting session?
That’s nothing. With session replay scripts, websites can review everything you did on their website even if you never saved or submitted anything.
They definitely can tell if they want to how much time was spent focused or not.
I can see how they can track what links I clicked on in their site, or which pages I visited but don’t see how they can track my cursor movements if I’m not clicking on anything.
Then this website will freak you the fuck out. :eek:
Everything that website does is stuff that any webpage you visit can do. It just shows you.
OK, so how does a website know where your cursor moved?
I presume you mean the mouse pointer. One very simple way to respond to mouse position is onmouseover / onmouseout events. Useful, for instance, to display tooltips as the user rolls over something. The general answer is that javascript is running in your browser, and knows very well where the mouse pointer is.
More fun to play with Neko the cat*. Click on the cat in the upper left.
- Yes, “Neko the cat” is redundant. But not everyone knows …
Note the “beforeunload” callback event can be used for this, although you would have to resort to blocking etc…to make sure it happens.
This is the source of this dialog:
That you will see when you, for example, type in a comment on Facebook but do not post it. If you open the inspector on this site you will see that chartbeat.js, yahoo-dom-event.js etc… are registered listeners for the unload event type as well as the vbulletin_textedit.js so that the SDMB can know to discard your abandoned reply. There are some issues and limitations, but here is the documentation from one ad provider being used on this page when I made this post.
A porn site caught me masturbating once and told my mother. I’ll never go there again.
if i input text into a text box like i’m doing to make this post, what happens to it if i close the tab before hitting submit? can the site see what i typed, as i typed it?
i’ve wondered this as i’ve interacted with online chat support people. can they see what i type before i hit enter?
It depends. I don’t think you can detect tab closes from a different domain in other tab unless there’s explicit coordination happening between the domains.
You definitely can detect when someone closes your own page though. There’s a built-in javascript event for that.
Yes they could, but I doubt many do. You could have a key event send your keypress to their server on ever stroke. That’d have a lot of overhead though.
Gee, you’re lucky. I paid $150 to some guy in Hong Kong twice because he said he had a recording of me masturbating that he would send to my mother, my co-workers, and my friends if I didn’t cough up. The third time I realized[ul]
[li]My mother is dead[/li][li]I am retired[/li][li]My friends, being burners, don’t care[/li][li]I have no camera on this computer[/li][/ul]Boy, am I a sucker.