How did they know I like that product?



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Have you ever gone to a website and an ad shows up on the screen. You then say to yourself, hey, I like that product...how is that happening? How does my computer know that I like that product?

I have asked myself this many times when an ad shows up and I realize I was just looking at the same product the other day. This is all due to behavioral targeting and personalized retargeting.

What are these you may be asking? Well, behavioral targeting is where "e-commerce marketers serve up customized ads on websites or cable TV stations based on a consumers prior activity."* So, if you visit a site, an ad will show up with a product similar to it. TV stations use data to determine what commercials to play in each house.

A news article by CBS News explains behavioral targeting well. On a very basic level, an ad marketing company will track the online behavior of consumers, including every webpage a consumer views, the links they click and if they make a purchase. Companies then purchase this data to get sales leads and save costs by only displaying relevant ads to those consumers that are most likely to make a purchase.

Personalized retargeting is a form of behavioral targeting. It basically goes further than just showing related ads. It "provides messages that refer to exact products a person views on a website."*

A way to understand this is using an example from the textbook. The consumer visits a site, a cookie will then be inserted into the browser, then when the consumer is on their computer again an ad will show up for that same item.*

It may seem like an invasion of privacy for people to track every move consumers make on the internet. The ads shown on my computer are all relevant to me and that is kind of nice. (Except for when the ad marketing company gets something wrong....and I have to ask myself...what is this product? Why do they think I would want this?)

As I am researching behavioral targeting, an ad for Nike showed up on the right side of the screen, because I had been looking at new shoes. I guess the marketing worked because I purchased them!

*Solomon, M. R. (2013). Consumer behavior. (10th ed., pp. 235-236). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Brady/Prentice Hall/Addison-Wesley.