Website Data

What Is Website Data?

Website Data refers to all the files, images, and cookies downloaded to a device when someone visits a website. This data provides information about a site user’s location, behavior, and interests.

Where Does Web Website Data Come From?

Website and app developers install cookies on your device when you visit their site or use their app. These website and app owners may keep this information to themselves or pass it on—anonymized—to third parties.

These trackers also collect passive behavioral information, such as the times you spend browsing the web or playing games on your phone.

Finally, search engines themselves provide website data. Google, for example, provides keyword volume data as well as rankings of websites per country per customizable time period.

What Types of Columns/Attributes Should I Expect When Working with This Data?

This data often appears in the form of an API, though user-friendly analytics pages like the Google Analytics page also provide the same information.

Common attributes of this data include website rank, the number of website visitors per month, and the number of visitors per country. Customer data includes country, language, amount of time spent and number of pages visited on the site, and transaction history.

What Is This Data Used For?

The main uses of this data are commercial. In other words, companies use this data to analyze market trends and competitors, scout investment opportunities based on those trends, and create targeted advertising campaigns.

On the side of the website visitor, this data can make loading websites and filling out information very fast. The user’s entire online experience becomes personalized, which many users enjoy.

How Should I Test the Quality of Website Data?

The best test for a quality website dataset is redundancy. By gathering as much data from as many sources as possible—first-party, third-party, etc.—you increase the accuracy of your data—providing it’s standardized and cleansed regularly, of course.

Interesting Case Studies and Blogs to Look Into

Tourism NZ uses SimilarWeb to shift focus during global pandemic
Afiliza Success Story

Tangible Examples of Impact

“It’s not the Wild West anymore, and browsers, smart routers such as Amazon’s Eero, satellite internet projects such as Elon Musk’s Starlink and other new tech, have the ability to filter everything,” said Zach Edwards, founder of analytics firm Victory Medium. “Upstream user data filtering and privacy-as-a-service are clearly where things are going in general.”

Although they’ll obviously morph and change over the next two years, the API proposals in Google’s Privacy Sandbox offer a peek into the future of data sharing on the web.

What’s In Google’s Privacy Sandbox? Nothing, For Now