More on Ad Targeting

Tara made a comment on my previous post about ad targeting. I had mentioned that I suddenly was getting Burberry ads on facebook. What Tara said is that a lot of the ad serving is done cross sites and is based on browsing history, something I had come across while doing research for a paper on an entirely different topic recently.

So how it works is, when you visit a site, whoever serves the advertisements on that site stores a cookie on your computer.  It’s basically just a tiny text file that stores information.  So what it does is tracks what sites you visit, and when you show up on another site that uses that company to serve ads, they use your browsing history to show you ads they’re algorithm determines you’ll have a high probability to click on. 

In this case Tara was exactly right, and I came across the proof just now.  I was reading digg, and there again appeared the Burberry ad.  This worked out because the ad service run by my future employer, Microsoft, has the advertisement contracts for both of these sites, Digg and Facebook.  So for whatever reason, my browsing history indicates that I’m likely to buy expensive clothing (or at least click through the ads).  It’s pretty creepy, but also pretty clever/cool, and it’s definitely not as evil as Google reading your email.  But that’s a conversation for a whole ‘nother day…