Tracking Users on the World Wide Web.

The current dominant business model of the web are financing website content with advertisements. Advertisers usually only pay if an ad view or ad click results in a subsequent purchase by the web site visitor. In order to detect which web sites led the visitor to a final purchase, it is necessary to track web user actions. The current used methods of tracking web users are identifed as a basic form of browser fingerprinting and also by using HTTP cookies. These two tracking methods are shown to face a downward trend of becoming less able to track web user actions.In this degree project several other potential methods of web user tracking are developed. Some of the tracking methods are also implemented as prototypes and subsequently evaluated. The evaluation shows that all implemented methods are able to successfully track some subset of all web users actions. The conclusion is that tracking web users by using the web browser cache is the best tracking method found in this degree project. The reasons are that this method can track a large share of user actions, it causes minor customer effects and also minor server side effects for the company performing the tracking.