When tracking visitors using an image beacon instead of the JavaScript tracker, what are the differences?

When you are using an image beacon to track your visitors instead of the default fully featured JavaScript tracker, there are several data points of the visitors that won’t be tracked:

  • Referrers, including Search Engine Keyword, Referrer Website URL and Social network URL
  • Screen resolutions
  • Browser plugins
  • Page titles
  • Time in local user’s timezone
  • The image tracker code also does not create first party tracking cookies which results in some information being lost.
  • Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
  • Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
  • Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user)

Information that will be correctly tracked include:

  • User IP address
  • Date and time of the request
  • URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
  • Location of the user: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
  • Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
  • Browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model

See also: How do I enable tracking for visitors that have disabled Javascript? and How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon)?