Have you ever explored your cookies?

Cookies are small snippets of codes that are dropped into your system by the websites you visit. You can disable cookies, you can delete cookies but you will miss the fun of a beautifully created world of “Web Analytics” specially made for you.  

If you are a budding web analyst start with the basics, see what you have already with you on your personal computer. Go to "C:\Users\sd83435\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files" 

and see the information that is hiding there, which is freely accessible to any of the companies owning the websites you visit. Scary right!!! If you are on Internet then there is nothing personal. No, don’t be scared of Internet, it’s for your own good :)

If you haven’t understood how to read these files then don’t worry, all of it is not really in human readable format. So, here is my cookie information when I visit nytimes.com

Ohh and if you find some other cookies other than the website you visited then don’t get scared,  these are the cookies dropped by ad’s that appeared on the web page or by the companies which website has partnered with to help them serve you better.

Open the files and you will see an alpha-numeric string which is the cookie ID which is also sometimes used to uniquely identify you.

If you are using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome then you will find the cookies in their respective temporary internet files folder. These cookies may not be as easy to read as the IE cookies because they are in sqlite format. Still, you will be able to identify some terms along with a lot of funny characters in the file.

So, here is a snapshot from my google chrome cookie when I visited india-forums.com.

Along with the web URL i.e. india-forums.com we see scorecardreserach.com. This is one of the companies india-forums has tied-up with to do data research and surveys. I have filled the survey sometime back on this website :)

doubleclick.net is the data dropped by ad’s shown the right side of web page I visited.  Now they know that I viewed this ad.

Other than the web URL’s there are some codes like utma, utmb, utmccn etc. This has been dropped into your computer by Google analytics. Wondering what Google Analytics is?

I’ll not get into details but in simple terms Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool which helps you collect, report and analyse lots and lots of data in a detailed fashion about people visiting the website. That means it collects oodles of data and sends it across back to the owner of india-forums.com in the form of reports.

So, this is the 1^st cut of crude data which the data administrators keep processing 24*7, which the reporting team report in the form of 1000’s of metrics and which the analysts sit and analyse day and night.

For now let’s step out of this boring looking flat-file and look at something colourful  Nothing new, but a colourful picture of the data we just saw above.

Debugging tools - There are multiple Debugging tools available on Internet to show you what is being transmitted to-and-fro in a very detailed and colourful manner. These are the best friends forever (BFF) of web analysts because before analysing the data, web analysts need to understand what data they are trying to analyse and also they can’t keep reading the text files all the time right !

IE gives you an option to add HTTP Watch, Mozilla firefox and chrome provides an add-on called Firebug. Download them, switch them on and you are ready to see the secret interaction between the web servers and your web browser.

Do you see that? Isn't it the same data which we saw in the cookie file for india-forums.com above in sqllite format? Isn’t it cool and easily accessible here? 

Try it out and remember all that you see loading here on just 1 click is collected in a text format at the web servers hosted by this company and this is nothing but the ‘WEB DATA’