Member Article

How Do Advertisers Follow You Around The Web?

Most web users will have had the slightly disconcerting experience of visiting a company’s website and then seeing advertising from that company on many of the sites they visit subsequently. If they don’t know how it’s done, seeing their browsing history following them around the web can make web users wonder exactly what advertisers know about their browsing habits.

In this article I’d like to take a quick look at just how advertisers pull this little trick off.

First some terminology: marketers refer to the process as behavioral remarketing, behavioral retargeting, or just remarketing. The majority of people who visit a company’s site won’t buy anything, but, because they have already demonstrated an interest in the company, marketers believe that they are more likely to make a purchase in the future

If my company sells premium bathroom fittings and, in the course of researching a purchase, a consumer visits my sites and clicks through a few of the product pages, but doesn’t buy anything, it’s reasonable to suppose that they intend to buy bathroom fittings in the near future, but haven’t decided from whom. By targeting that customer with advertising, perhaps containing promotional offers, the chances that they will buy from my company is considerably increased.

How Is It Done?

When you visit the website of a company using behavioral remarketing, your browser will load and store a cookie from the servers of an advertising network: a so-called third-party cookie or tracking cookie. A cookie is just a short text file that can contain arbitrary data: in this case it records that your browser has visited the company’s site or contains an identifying token linked to a record on the ad network’s server.

If you subsequently visit a site on which the advertising network has purchased advertising space, your browser will run a little snippet of code from the page that will read the contents of the tracking cookie and then display the appropriate adverts.

Tracking cookie is a bit of a misnomer because they aren’t actually tracking you; they don’t contain information that can be linked to your personal identity in most cases. Sometimes they do, particularly if you’re logged into a social network that loads widgets on the sites you’re visiting or your Google account, but, for the most part, all advertisers want to do is send you appropriate advertising based on your past behavior: most personal information isn’t especially helpful in achieving that aim.

For businesses, remarketing is a powerful technique for re-engaging the attention of people who have demonstrated an interest in their site. For web users, it results in advertising for products and services they likely to be interested in, instead of random and irrelevant ads.

About Rachel Gillevet - Rachel is the technical writer for WiredTree, a leader in fully managed dedicated and vps hosting. Follow Rachel and WiredTree on Twitter, @wiredtree, Like them on Facebook and check out more of their articles on their web hosting blog, http://www.wiredtree.com/blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rachel Gillevet .