US Patent 8365150 Multi-party web-beacon-based analytics

Tools and techniques are provided to allow partners of analytics providers and others who use web-beacons to submit executable web-beacon plug ins. Analytics providers and others may also write web-beacon plug-ins. Certified plug-ins are executed in response to page loads, visitor clicks, and other visitor and programmatic actions at a website that has been tagged by the analytics provider's web-beacon, without requiring re-tagging of the website with a separate web-beacon for the partner. Web-beacons may invoke core analytics code of an analytics provider, where core analytics code may include multiple plug-ins selected by respective analytics provider partners, where each plug-in may send different analytics data from a website visitor's system to a respective analytics provider partner server. This allows the partner to obtain analytics data by piggybacking on the analytics provider, without re-tagging, and without compromising the availability and accuracy of the analytics data already being gathered.