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Recently, I have been using Fullstory to view how my visitors behave on my landing page - and boy does it make a huge difference when that visitor comes from Google or Facebook ads.
Regular visitors from an email that I send out, or from a mailing list, reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to digest. Though the clip is 3X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense. [Ed. note: Clips are on source page.]
This visitor is very different - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Mobile users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave.
As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.
[...] I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook relative to other organic means?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:14PM
Holy Shit.
*disables javascript*
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:21PM
Makes me wonder if the article was really an advertisement for this fullstory service.
Privacy freaks will be horrified.
But the kind of people concerned with the content of his post are the exact marketing demographic for fullstory's itself.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:42PM
No doubt.
my anti-tracking applications intercepted the attempt to visit the webpage. I knew he had tracking, obviously, but I expected to not run javascript on the site. Instead, i was prevented from visiting unless I wanted to override my safety settings...
In practice, I've only seen aggresive advertising cause this reaction.
(Score: 1) by charon on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:09PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:20PM
Yeah I want to know what anti-tracking stuff that guy is using.
I use noscript, requestpolicy and privacybadger.
I would not say it loads just fine with all of that turned on as usual, but it is readable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:58PM
That just goes to show that you're not blocking enough and are still getting tracked.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:14AM
What method is he using to track the mouse?
Have you been able to look at the data stream while reading?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by charon on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:59AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:17PM
Man, this is beyond evil. I decided to risk a look, since I'm here at work ;)
So it looks like his site is hosted by Squarespace, and the Fullstory stuff is a Squarespace plugin. Which means the tracking code is coming from his own domain, so my usual solution of blocking at the firewall any domain that I consider "untrustworthy" isn't going to cut it. Although I may block Squarespace entirely now, just to be safe. Bastards.
In the Firefox Network window I'm seeing the page periodically hitting the following URL, mostly when the window changes focus or a new page is loaded. I'm not seeing anything in that window that seems to be triggered by merely moving around the page though...:
https://youexec.com/api/census/RecordHit?crumb=BN0OlLGH0nGBOTNlMGRlYzI4M2NmZDdhOWYwZTA4MjMwNmNkZmQ0 [youexec.com]
Included in that request were the following fields:
crumb=BN0OlLGH0nGBOTNlMGRlYzI4M2NmZDdhOWYwZTA4MjMwNmNkZmQ0;
ss_cvr=55ededf2-155e-4926-93ac-fdac1b91fabc|1484850177958|1484850177958|1484850177958|1;
ss_cvt=1484850177958;
ss_cid=a5dd8ee3-8270-4357-80cf-10bb41957dd7;
ss_cvisit=1484850179375;
ss_cpvisit=1484850179375;
JSESSIONID=c0cj7gzuLT0r6viwzTISRaSmIiPqzIsewVwQYM9QTqAviS_Miy9XKA
This data is getting triggered from the following script on Squarespace:
https://static.squarespace.com/universal/scripts-compressed/common-0c746e90330dcf0b9652-min.js [squarespace.com]
That Javascript looks like it's configured to trigger on Javascript events mouseDown, mouseUp, mouseMove, mouseEnter, mouseOut, mouseWheel, mouseEveryGoddamnThing...Plus the equivalent touch events. If you aren't very familiar with Javascript, here's a reference of what those can do:
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/dom_obj_event.asp [w3schools.com]
But yeah, what I DON'T see is data tracking every individual mouse movement. The ss_cvt variable above appears to be the "event start in milliseconds", crumb I think is a visitor ID of some sort. Firefox also shows the arguments being passed to the Java function, which includes an "event log" of what events were seen, but not where or how long (it's just an array with values like "scroll", "mousemove", etc). Looking at the video, that actually might be all it sends, and FullStory just fakes the rest. I think someone mentioned below that it's not particularly accurate, so that would explain why if that's how they're doing it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:26PM
A good demo of some of the javascript tracking that is possible is found at clickclickclick.click [clickclickclick.click]. It obviously needs javascript for the demo and works best with the sound on.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:37PM
Interesting but I smell fertilizer. Some things worked, but most of it seemed canned, did not actually follow what I did with mouse, etc., or was very slow. It's a little entertaining.
On Old Opera (11.xx) nothing happens, even with javascript on, and looking at "view source" it did not pull in any of the external scripts, which is why I will continue to use Old Opera for most web browsing.
Old Opera has per-site control, including complete blocking, cookies both 1st and 3rd party, javascript, style sheets, etc. I've never understood why it did not catch on with 99% of the tech community.
(Score: 3, Funny) by jdavidb on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:04PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 3, Touché) by RS3 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:47PM
ASCII Art!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:25PM
Old Opera died because it was inflexible. It had excellent ideas, but the few annoyances couldn't be removed. Meanwhile, Phoenix/Firefox was barely serviceable, but extremely flexible due to the ability to use addons. In very short order, users learned that Opera was by far superior to bare Firefox, but that with a bit of effort, Firefox could be tweaked almost perfectly to your own personal liking (even if it took three dozen addons to do it).
Once all the tabbed-browsing addons hit Firefox, I switched over to it and never looked back. (Well, until the devs went insane, but now there's Pale Moon [palemoon.org]...)
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:44PM
This brings up an interesting point though. How would javascript blocking affect this guy's invasive metrics? Otherwise, I can't see someone running bots to do this, unless it's Google or Facebook themselves, or perhaps it's other advertisers trying to defame Google and Facebook.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:21PM
I don't use any tracking tricks on my site. I can see how many people visited which pages and how long and where they surfed in from with AWstats, but I would NEVER use crap like the submitter uses. That kind of bullshit is just evil. There's a tiny bit of javascript on three of my pages; the three pages that don't work in a phone. The javascript loads a phone-friendly version.
But he sounds like he's describing bots; specifically, spiders and other such bots that search engines use. As far as ads go, I have none. My site is a service, not something to earn money with (my other site is a blog, also with no javascript or ads).
Pages like this guy's that take longer to load on a high speed connection than in 1997 on a 33.3k modem because of all the ads and scripting piss me off. If I landed on the guy's site, I doubt I'd return.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:39PM
If you can tell how long someone spent on a page, then you are doing some sort of active tracking.
No, it doesn't count just to see that someone moved from one page to another; I might leave my desk for a few minutes to take the dog for a walk, and that intervening length of time doesn't mean I've found a particular page engrossing.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:40PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:33PM
One of the ways I block these fuckers, is on a DNS level. That request from my browser never makes it to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:31PM
unless it's Google or Facebook themselves
Ding ding ding ding... now who stands to benefit from when it looks like you are getting a visitor on your site because they clicked on one of your ads? Follow the money...