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There are essentially 2 ways and advertiser buys ad space on a website. The simplest way is just the advertiser buying directly from the website and not caring really who you are but that isn't interesting. Increasingly ads are bought through ad exchanges (heading towards 50% of ad spend now). The journey starts when you go to an advertiser's website. As you are browsing the website you will be firing pixels (traditionally invisible images but other methods can be used) that allow the advertisers ad buying platform to identify you and where you have been on their site. At this point the buying platform essentially has a record of what pages you've been to on the advertisers site alongside an ID that's unique to their platform. With this information they put users into buckets of people they want to target and people they don't based on whether they purchased or just browsed for example. Now when you browse sites with advertising on most of them are sending requests out to ad exchanges. These exchanges receiving the incoming request from the publisher and then hold an auction where 10s or 100s of platforms can all compete to show you the ad. When the request comes out the platforms are able to identify you by the ID they set previously and decide what bid to place on you. When it comes to deciding what products to show in the ad most platforms are really simple. As you browse the advertisers site they store the last product you looked at in a cookie on your browser. Once they've bought the ad slot they will then look up that cookie and decide on other products based on that ID. There are more sophisticated platforms now that can tie that information back into your previous purchase history and show much better personalised recommendations. Now I admit that there is a potentially creepy element to this as there is a lot of data being generated that could build up a profile of you. It's for this reason that ad companies take significant steps to avoid tying in personal information. With the platform I work on it's a major issue if we're accidentally passed an email address or name. It would be an instant sacking offence if somebody did try and work out who somebody is. Where we use advertisers purchase history we are mapping their anonymous customer identifier to ours - we never see any personal info.
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Dec 20, 2014 21:37
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:14 |
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quote:We also need to have some sort of technology that can replace the functionality of Cookies while improving users better ability to control their use to prevent retargeting , or at least to minimise it to the point that it's less creepy (I don't ever trust that anyone is going to care about the 'Do Not Track' button unless they're absolutely forced to). And a law that states that anyone who makes an advert autoplay any sort of noise should be loving executed on the spot. Cookies are a lot better than some of the alternatives for tracking people in terms of privacy. The only alternative currently is fingerprinting devices - examining the various attributes like IP address, user agent, time of day that you're seen, to identify with a strong probability that you're the same person. The problem is in order to do this you essentially do have to build up personal profiles to get enough points to match to. That's the kind of situation where you are building up and cross matching information that is a bit creepy. That's what worries me most about a lot of probabilistic cross device tracking companies - they essentially work by identifying the IP addresses up live at and work at and when you travel between them. For cookie/device ID based deterministic tracking you don't need to bother with that. You just work with publishers that have login gated areas to sync up to say this cookie and this device ID both logged in as the same user (without revealing who that user is). I think that's more anonymous that the probabilistic model even though it's more accurate. The industry is actually taking steps to homogenise cookies so that if you opt out once it will opt out across the majority of ad tech companies (excluding Google, Facebook, Twitter). It's basically a response to Google and Facebook being in a position where they have all your data and could easily turn nasty and try and control the whole market.
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Dec 26, 2014 10:14
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