GESIS Web Tracking

What is GESIS Web Tracking?

GESIS Web Tracking supports social scientists who aim to answer their research questions using linked web tracking and survey data. This includes the development, maintainance and provision of unique 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 social scientists with detailed insights into human behavior, its determinants, and the individual and societal consequences of digital media.

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), health research (online search for information about, e.g., diseases or vaccination) or communication science (social media use).

GESIS Web Tracking is designed as a service that can be integrated into various research environments. The service comprises four pillars:

We provide a research software developed and permanently maintained by academic scholars and professional developers. The research software will be published open source by the end of 2024.

The service is used as the core measure for collecting digital behavioral data within 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.

We offer consulting, training materials and R packages for supporting social scientists in analyzing linked web tracking and survey data.

How does the GESIS Web Tracking software work?

The GESIS Web Tracking software works via a browser plugin on desktop devices. The plugin 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 multiple browsers. After entering a personal identifier into the browser plugin, the recording of Internet activity begins. The video above shows an example of how Internet usage is recorded: Once the participant visits a new website, the tool records the visit’s URL and assigns it to the pseudonymized participant ID. In addition, the plugin both records the visit’s duration and transmits its html text content to the research server.

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 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.

Supplements to webtracking

The service is supplemented by:

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.
Additional materials: Documentation of the browser plugin and method reports on the data collection.
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.
Individual counseling: We consult you regarding the use of the browser plugin and the integration of the collected data into your research.