Tracking Pixel

So, ... did you read my email?


Jul 22nd, 2017

A tracking pixel, is one of various techniques used on web pages or email, to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed some content. Common uses are email tracking and page tagging for web analytics. Alternative names are web beacon, web bug, tracking bug, tag, or page tag, pixel tag, 1×1 gif, and clear gif. When implemented using JavaScript, they may be called JavaScript tags [1]

There is a work in progress to standardize an interface that web developers can use to asynchronously transfer small HTTP data from the User Agent to a web server that call it simply beacons (in the context of web development) which can be used to send data to a web server prior to the loading of the document without delaying the load and affecting the perception of page load performance for the next navigation [2].

The excerpt above has been retrieved from wikipedia.

References

[1] The Web Bug FAQ
[2] Beacon
[3] Source: Wikipedia