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posted by on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the bots-trolling-bots dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:21PM (#455581)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:42PM (#455595)

    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

      by charon (5660) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:09PM (#455619) Journal
      I use Firefox with NoScript. I see this article just fine and I did not change settings or allow any scripts.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:20PM (#455628)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:58PM (#455757)

          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

        by frojack (1554) on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:14AM (#455824) Journal

        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

          by charon (5660) on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:59AM (#455841) Journal
          I admit I do not know. I assumed it was the javascript served by his domain which I did not allow. It could be the latest NSA malware which loads from a gif and allows Donald Trump to send tweets from your machine. I guess I am not paranoid enough.
          • (Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:17PM

            by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:17PM (#456162) Journal

            I admit I do not know. I assumed it was the javascript served by his domain which I did not allow. It could be the latest NSA malware which loads from a gif and allows Donald Trump to send tweets from your machine. I guess I am not paranoid enough.

            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.