First Evidon Global Tracker Report Reveals World's Most Prolific Trackers

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Evidon, the world leader in empowering consumers and businesses to see, understand and control data online, today issued their first Global Tracker Report at the standing-room-only Evidon Empower Europe II event in London. A survey of tracking across the web revealed, among other things, the extent of Google’s and Facebook’s ubiquity as third-party trackers - taking the top five positions of the world’s Top 25 trackers - the cost in latency of web trackers, and the reality of how social data is captured.

Google’s Analytics and AdSense services lead the pack, followed by Facebook Social Plugins at number three, then Google +1 and Facebook Connect. With five services in total appearing in the report, Google has the biggest tracking reach – its free-to-publishers analytics service was encountered on more than 70% of all unique domains in Q1, and Google +1 has risen to rival Facebook’s ‘Like’ buttons after a dramatic rise from its launch in late June 2011.

The report also revealed that the average number of third-party tracking elements on individual websites comes in at 4.7, with 81% of all sites employing between one to five trackers.

Commenting on the research data gathered using a ‘commonality score’* from Evidon’s 1.6 million member opt-in GhostRank panel of Ghostery users, Scott Meyer, Founder and CEO, said: “One thing the report clarifies is that these two companies have significantly more tracking reach than anyone else in the marketplace. The report stresses the importance of brands understanding and being in control of the data on their sites. If brands do not maintain this control, their ability to effectively access data could be restricted to a few platforms.”

Both Google and Facebook have recently amended their privacy policies, with Google announcing it will soon consolidate all data into a single platform. The report highlights that analytics and social tags are seen much more often and accessed more frequently than online paid-for ad trackers, and also coincides with Microsoft’s declaration to set Do Not Track (DNT) as the default option for the pending Internet Explorer 10, raising questions about whether these types of social and analytics tools will be exempt from the DNT default, or how European regulators will respond to the more lenient stance taken by them on the matter of obtaining prior consent.

The report also examined latency issues caused by tracking elements across the web. Inspecting the cost in milliseconds of page load incurred by the adoption of third-party tracking elements, the Global Tracker Report shows that Russian web users suffer the most with page loading times of 654 milliseconds, while Switzerland benefits from speedier wait times of 421 milliseconds. The UK and US experience similar delays of 507 and 522 milliseconds respectively.

For more information and to request a copy of the report, please visit http://www.evidon.com/solutions/research

*Commonality score is a result of an algorithm applied to Ghostrank panel numbers that accounts both for volume and unique domains on which a tracking element was seen.

ENDS

ABOUT EVIDON

Evidon empowers consumers and businesses to see, understand and control data online.

With insights fuelled by its Ghostery browser extension, automated scanner, and rich, 800+ company privacy database, Evidon enables businesses to assess the cookies and other tracking activity on their websites, helping them to protect their audience data and improve performance.

As the first and largest dedicated provider of privacy and compliance solutions for digital media, Evidon also enables leading brands, agencies, publishers, advertising networks and others to comply easily with privacy laws and self-regulatory programs across North America and Europe. Evidon serves over a billion “Ad Choices” notices daily on behalf of these businesses - in the U.S. and in local languages across Europe - giving consumers transparency into and control over how their information is used online.

By protecting themselves and empowering consumers, businesses build their brands and improve results.

For more information, please visit: www.evidon.com