What is GESIS Web Tracking?
GESIS Web Tracking is a research software for recording browser-based online behavior.
Especially combined with established survey instruments for researching attitudes and demographic characteristics, web tracking data can provide information about human behavior and its consequences.
Web tracking can be used in various disciplines such as political science (e.g. media use and voting behavior), psychology (Internet use and mental wellbeing), economics (shopping behavior) or communication science (social media use).
GESIS Web Tracking is designed as a stand-alone service that can be integrated into various research environments. The service comprises three pillars:
Provision of research software that is permanently revised; the deployment of updates during ongoing surveys is supported. The research software will be published open source by the end of 2024.
The service is currently used as a part of the GESIS Panel.dbd. In regular calls, we invite researchers to submit survey items that are played out to our web tracking cohort.
We provide data products at various aggregation levels. These data products can be linked to the survey data of the GESIS Panel.dbd.
How does the research software work?
The software for tracking the data works via a browser plugin on desktop devices. This is available for Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. At the beginning of a study, participants are asked to install the plugin in one or more browsers. After entering a personal identifier into the browser plugin, the recording of internet activity begins. If the user navigates to a new URL in the browser, the tool records this and assigns it to the pseudonymized participant ID. During the visit to the page, the duration of this visit is recorded. When the user leaves the page, the plugin transmits this information and the html text content of page to the research server. The image above shows an example of how Internet usage is recorded.
Participants can activate the "private mode" in the plugin at any time, which interrupts the recording of the pages visited. They can also uninstall the plugin themselves.
Research using the GESIS Web Tracking
The service is supplemented by:
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Commitment to Open Science principles: Maintenance, further development and open source publication of the browser plugin; the source code will be published and made available for re-use.
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Additional materials: Documentation of the browser plugin and method reports on the data collection.
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Integrated data: The browser plugin is used in the GESIS Panel.dbd. The data generated by the web tracking can be linked to the survey data in the panel.
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Individual counseling: We consult you regarding the use of the browser plugin and the integration of the collected data into your research.
The service is based on a browser plugin that was originally developed in a DFG/SNF project by Prof. Silke Adam and Prof. Michaela Maier.
The figure shows results of a study conducted with the browser plugin. It shows the proportion of political content in all visits by the study participants in the context of the 2021 federal election. The analysis shows that the consumption of political content on news sites was highest on the day of the election and remained at a similar level to the consumption of political content via Twitter (today X) over the entire observation period. On Facebook, on the other hand, the proportion of political content consumed was significantly lower. This shows that important information on the consumption of political content is missing if only data from individual social networks (like Twitter/X) are considered. The cross-website coverage of GESIS Web Tracking can help closing data gaps in existing research.
GESIS Web Tracking team
GESIS Web Tracking team
