12
2010
Monetizing Cookie Crumbs
By now, most web-surfing adults have heard of or know what a cookie is. I’m not talking Toll-House here. This is about the type of cookies placed on computers that track web-surfing. With the integration of Doubleclick into Google and also available through most third party ad servers, any website owner can leverage cookie technology and re-target visitors to their site.
Here are the basics of how this works. A tag is placed in your website code which sets a cookie on the hard drive of your site’s visitors’ computers. This cookie contains code in a file that is then tracked as a person visits other sites. When they visit a site within a larger network (e.g., the Google content network), the cookie is recognized and that computer (person) is re-targeted with your ad.
The key advantage to a website owner doing this is their ads are now being delivered to people that have visited their site. The site visitors are familiar with your brand and products or services and the re-marketing ads can be segmented to correspond to the specific page on your website that was visited. For example, lets say officemax.com is using re-marketing cookies. If I initially visit officemax.com and check out a page about chairs, officemax.com can set a unique cookie on my computer corresponding to this page. When I later visit another website as part of a content network (as in the Google example above), the cookie will trigger an Office Max ad for chairs.
The benefit to going to this level of targeting and re-marketing is that Office Max knows I was shopping for chairs. The re-marketing/re-targeting ad will see higher returns than if Office Max placed the same ad on a site that is served to someone that never visited officemax.com. This creates efficiencies in a media buy through higher response rates and conversion rates.
For those that are concerned with privacy, there is no need to worry. Cookies can be disabled and they don’t track a person, they track a computer.
To learn more about using data for re-marketing to improve your marketing efficiency, check out our marketing analytics services and media planning sections. Or, give us a shout. We’d love to talk about this more and show off our geekiness.
Flickr image courtesy of Werwin15
