This document summarizes a presentation on simplifying web analytics for digital marketing. It discusses challenges like identifying optimal marketing spend across multiple channels and privacy concerns with collecting user data. It then describes a software prototype that audits, monitors, and reports on tags deployed on websites to track user behavior. Real-time dashboards provide visibility into tag performance and compliance. The tool aims to empower marketers and analysts with tag-related information.

1. Simplifying Web Analytics for Digital Marketing
Andy Bengel, Amin Shawki, Dippy Aggarwal*
* Ph.D. Candidate, University of Cincinnati, Ohio
2nd International Workshop on Privacy and Security of
Big Data (PSBD 2015)
in conjunction with
2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data
(IEEE BigData 2015)
October 29, 2015, Santa Clara, CA, USA
Andy Bengel Amin Shawki

2. Big data and Marketing
**A Jew goes to a Rabbi and says, "Rabbi, help me, my chickens are dying!"
The Rabbi thinks for a while, and says, "Try washing them in sea water."
The Jew comes back after a week, and says, "Rabbi, my chickens are still
dying!"
The Rabbi thinks some more, and replies, "Try giving them fresh radishes."
Another week later, the Jew returns looking very sad and says to the Rabbi,
"Rabbi, all my chickens are dead!"
Rabbi scratchs his head, and says, "Oh, what a pity! I had so many more good
ideas."
**Source: Michael Loban, The Rabbi, Big Data, and the Value of Web Analytics, http://tinyurl.com/nmzu69t
**”The number of options is endless, but budgets are limited, and
market attention is miniscule”
Analytics to the rescue

3. Challenges for Digital Marketing in the
Big Data World
• Marketing campaigns span multiple channels
• Increased volume of data generated by the digital
channels
Challenge #1: How can we identify optimal marketing
spend and its impact towards marketing optimization
and sales to the forefront.
Page-tagging represents a fundamental element enabling
digital marketing efforts.

4. Page-Tagging and Privacy Concerns
A tag is a piece of code that gets embedded on web pages
to collect site and visitor’s browsing behavior.
Challenge #2: Channel for information leak if not monitored
correctly.

5. Use-case illustrating privacy violations
Are the 2016 Presidential Candidates Secretly Collecting
Data about You?
Goal: Scan each Democratic and Republican candidate’s website.
The goal being to discover what tags, if any, candidates are using
to collect your information.
Used our software to look at candidate websites and see if
they are collecting your data.
Two types of tags were looked for: Data aggregators and
retargeting tags.
Reference: Alexx Web, Are the 2016 Presidential Candidates Secretly Collecting Data about You?, Online: http://tinyurl.com/pzdrncj

6. Are the 2016 Presidential Candidates
Secretly Collecting Data about You?
Seven of the candidates are using “Rapleaf,” a data aggregator which does collect
personally identifying information about people (name and email address) and has
been in trouble in the past for selling that information to third parties.

7. Ensuring Privacy Compliance
Make sure you and your client’s data is both protected and
compliant.
Data from your tags can often be hijacked, especially when
piggy-backing of tags occur.
The Policies features in our approach allow the user to be alerted when a tag is
found when it shouldn’t be, when a tag is missing entirely, or even if a tag isn’t
loading in the correct way

8. Research Question
Can we build a solution that can empower digital
marketers and analysts by providing them with all the
information related to tags that are deployed on their
websites?

9. Our proposed solution
We build an all-in-one solution that can support tag
auditing, monitoring and reporting solution.

10. Snapshots of Software Prototype
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11. Snapshots of Software Prototype
Site being
scanned
Tag loaded via another tag
Tags present directly
on the website

12. Snapshots of Software Prototype

13. Tag Auditing in Real time
Real-time insight into the tag behavior on your site.
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2
3
4

14. Our solution
Snapshots for real-time tag monitoring
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2

15. Contributions
1. A web-based, real-time tag discovery and analysis tool.
2. Dashboard oriented visualization providing a complete picture
of site’s and tag performance
3. A pleasing yet simple and intuitive look and feel with support
for exploring the vast amount of information provided by the
product in a drill-down manner thus making it easier to
comprehend.
4. Facilitates information capture on important site performance
measures such as tag latency and page load time.

16. Thank you.
Questions/Feedback?
Dippy Aggarwal
aggarwdy@mail.uc.edu
Andy Bengel
andy@infotrustllc.com
Amin Shawki
amin@infotrustllc.com