How AdSense + Online Advertisers Profile You

Do you ever wonder how the Internet knows what you're interested in when you see adverts that seem targeted towards you?
Maybe you were looking for holidays and then you began to see more travel and tourism advertising. Typically, the advertising mechanisms monitor (track) your activity and then provide you with ads for things that you already want. The concept is pretty simple, even if complex in application.

A disconcerting actuality is that nearly all consumers' activities and page viewings are being tracked at all times by more than one company.
There are many aspects to online advertisement provision, and consumers might not like what they find out.

Take Google for example. A valuable research case - as they are extraordinarily providers and authorities at the same time.
What provides Google's authority, adding to an omnipotent product line, is that they manage a large database of user accounts that are associated with users' internet traffic without any bounds. When traffic comes and goes from a machine using a user account that Google can create a link to (a Google ID, perhaps), a targeted profile for advertising can be linked to that specific user.
With comparatively higher accuracy in matching users' interests, Google's method is superior to methods that employ less data and intrusion ('stalking').

All the big companies have methods similar to this to meet their advertising aims, with activity tracking practices even being used by many high-traffic websites. Some track only search activities, but all sorts of interactions are trackable including keystrokes. When an account for one of these companies is not recognised or available, there are fallback mechanisms. The advertisement provider's service must still create profiles to enable targeting of some degree.

The most practical marker for targeting without person-unique user accounts is the IP address of the client machine's public route. This results in overlapping of individual user's interests, serving the same adverts to all members of a household that are not using associated user-accounts. However, more random topic selection can often lead to higher engagement.

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