How behavioral targeting works

I am interested in knowing how Behavioral Targeting is implemented. What are the tools used to track the page views by a customer who's browsing your site? How would you know what other sites he is visiting?

Just Curious
Thursday, February 5, 2004

Doubleclick works in conjunction with a number of sites. This way they know what sites you visit, and when you sign up for one - they get your contact information.

They can start targeting advertising towards you this way. My sister told me she browsed a bunch of maternity and motherhood sites, and when she logged on to her yahoo mail saw ads for places that sold this kind of thing.

Some log analyzers will show you "top paths through your site" and how long people stay on any page (though if it's the last page in a sequence there's no way of knowing how long they read before they left).

I remember one that worked with your site/browser and created a version of your page that showed you how frequently someone clicked on each link.

You can also go to alexa and google to see what sites are related to yours, one based on visitors, the other links, though you have to be big enough to be listed in each of these, referrers do largely the same thing Google does though.

www.MarkTAW.com
Thursday, February 5, 2004

But to do that, they would naturally have to collaborate with some ISPs, wouldn't they?

Just Curious
Thursday, February 5, 2004

Doubleclick puts an inline frame on all it's member sites so it can put a cookie on your machine that works across all sites in it's network. That's really the only way to know what other sites people visit, short of installing spyware.... er, a toolbar.

www.MarkTAW.com
Thursday, February 5, 2004

Thanks for sharing the info, Mike.

Just Curious
Friday, February 6, 2004

Sorry for the typo, *Mark*.

Just Curious
Friday, February 6, 2004

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