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Web Ads With An Audience Of One
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DrivePM, for example, runs a successful campaign for a hotel chain that tracks users who visit the chain's Web site but don't book a room.
"Those are prime candidates for us to get back in front of and ratchet up an even more compelling offer," like discounts on price, he said. So if a user returns to any site in DrivePM's network in a three-day period, Drive serves an ad offering 10 percent off the next booking. Because so many people have then booked rooms through the site, he said, the advertiser's average cost for each reservation has plummeted.
The same goes for cars.
"We definitely know that people are likely to click over to a marketer's site as a result of behavioral targeting," said Anna Papadopoulos, interactive media director for Euro RSCG 4D, a digital ad agency with clients including Volvo.
Say an online shopper visits Yahoo Autos and looks at a Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicle, she said. The shopper leaves the page, checks Yahoo e-mail, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo stock quotes and logs off. All his visits are tracked by a cookie, she said. Ten minutes or a day or a week later, when the cookie signals that he is back on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo's proprietary behavioral-targeting platform can serve an ad for the SUV on that site.
A typical advertising network has thousands of Web site clients. What aQuantive and other ad firms do is segment their Web site partners' audiences into categories of users: car buyers, health-food buyers, camping-gear enthusiasts. Advertisers can also segment further, based on geography, sex and other criteria.
DoubleClick allows advertisers to gauge the effectiveness of ads by seeing how many clicks were made on an ad of a specific size in a specific corner of a Web site in a specific hour.
In 1999, DoubleClick drew criticism when it announced plans to merge a massive offline database of consumer records with its online user-history database. The ensuing uproar and a 2000 Federal Trade Commission complaint led DoubleClick to cancel the plan.
Last month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group asked the FTC to investigate Google's data-retention policies in light of its proposed acquisition of DoubleClick.
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
