Jennie Pearson

My boyfriend was recently shopping online for a new set of Egyptian cotton sheets. On a Sunday morning we were lounging around looking at totally non-sheet related websites on his laptop and he asked, “What’s with all the Egyptian cotton sheet ads online these days?” And I replied, “Have you been shopping on Amazon for new sheets?”  He nodded. There you go.

That is behavioral targeting at it’s finest.

Here’s how it works:
A company operating a website joins an ad network. When you visit a website in the network, a cookie is placed on your browser that begins collecting information. These cookies then track the pages you visit, how long you spend, the searches you make and what articles you read. All this information is then used to segment you into groups with other like-minded browsers. Once you are segmented, when you go to another website in the ad network – no matter what the content of that site is – you can see an ad targeted to your previous online behavior.

So what happened to my boyfriend was that cookies stored in his browser identified that he was shopping for Egyptian cotton sheets online. Because he visited multiple sites, read reviews and compared prices he was probably placed in a segment called “Likely buyer of Egyptian cotton” or something like that. So that a week later when we were reading other blogs in that ad network, we saw ads for good deals on high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets even though the content of the blog had nothing to do with sheets.

The benefits of Behavioral Targeting:

The benefits of behavioral targeting are plenty. First advertisers can get better ROI by improving the performance of their online advertising and secondly, consumers see ads that are relevant. AdAge recently wrote that a world without behavioral targeting or collecting information online “would be like having the same conversation” over and over again. It would also be like the billboards along the highway. Relevant for a few, irrelevant and an eyesore for many more. Why not use the information available to improve the online experience. Otherwise websites would be like Time Square at night: every sign competing for your attention, each new billboard trying to be bigger, brighter and more colorful than the one next to it and almost all of them irrelevant to you.

Benefits for advertisers:
+ Identify potential customers by their behaviors rather than demographics
+ Increase ROI by showing your ad to consumers who are more likely interested in what you have to show them

Benefits for consumers:
+ Exposed to ads that are relevant to you
+ Reduce clutter and nonsensical ads

Some people are getting all up in arms about privacy and the security of all this information being collected. But these fears are largely unfounded. Almost all of the information stored from your browser is kept anonymous and stored in highly secured servers.