GESIS Web Tracking

GESIS Web Tracking supports social scientists in answering their research questions by linking web tracking with survey data. This includes the development, maintenance and provision of specialized research software designed to record browser-based online behavior.

Especially when combined with established survey instruments that measure attitudes and demographic characteristics, web tracking data offers detailed insights into human behavior, the determinants and the individual and societal effects of digital media.

Web tracking is applicable across various disciplines, including political science (e.g., media use and voting behavior), psychology (e.g., Internet use and mental well-being), economics (e.g., shopping behavior), health research (e.g., online searches for diseases or vaccination information) as well as media and communication science (e.g., social media use).

GESIS Web Tracking is a service designed for integration into various research projects. The service is built upon four key pillars:

We provide research software developed and maintained by academics and professional developers. This software will be published open source in 2025.

The provided web tracking tool is the primary instrument for collecting digital behavioral data in the GESIS Panel.dbd. Researchers are regularly invited to submit survey items, which are then administered to our web tracking cohort.

We offer data products at different levels of aggregation, which can be linked with the survey data from the GESIS Panel.dbd.

We provide consulting services, training materials and R packages to help social scientists analyzing the linked web tracking and survey data.

How does the GESIS Web Tracking software work?

GESIS Web Tracking operates through a browser plugin installed on desktop computers and laptops. The plugin is compatible with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. At the start of a study, participants are asked to install the plugin in their main browser. After entering a personal identifier, the browser plugin begins recording participants’ Internet activity.

The video above demonstrates how the browser plugin tracks Internet usage: when a participant visits a new website, the browser plugin records the URL and links it to a pseudonymized participant ID. Additionally, the browser plugin logs the website visit's duration and sends the HTML content of the page in encrypted form to a server at GESIS.

Research using the GESIS Web Tracking

The figure illustrates how the ability of GESIS Web Tracking to collect online behavior across websites helps address gaps in existing research data. It shows the proportion of political content consumed across websites by study participants over the course of the 2021 German federal election campaign. The analysis reveals that the consumption of political content on news websites peaked on election day and closely paralleled political content consumption via Twitter (now X) throughout the observation period. In contrast, the proportion of political content consumed on Facebook was significantly lower. This shows that relying solely on data from one isolated social network, such as Facebook, misses important insights into political information behaviors across different websites.

GESIS Web Tracking team