Behavioral targeting

Behavioral targeting comprises a range of technologies and techniques used by online website publishers and advertisers aimed at increasing the effectiveness of advertising using user web-browsing behavior information. In particular, "behavioral targeting uses information collected from an individual’s web-browsing behavior (e.g., the pages that they have visited or searched) to select advertisements to display".

Definition
Behavioral targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns through information collected on an individual’s Web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. The technique helps deliver online advertisements to the users who will be the most interested in them. Behavioral data can also be combined with other user information such as purchase history to create a more complete user profile.

Network behavioral targeting
Advertising networks use behavioral targeting in a different way than individual sites. Since they serve many advertisements across many different sites, they are able to build up a picture of the likely demographic makeup of internet users.

Data from a visit to one website can be sent to many different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, Facebook, Yahoo, many traffic-logging sites, and smaller ad firms. This data can sometimes be sent to more than 100 websites. The data is collected by using cookies, web beacons and similar technologies, and/or a third-party ad serving software, to automatically collect information about site users and site activity.

Data Mining
This data is collected without attaching the people’s names, address, email address or telephone number, but it may include device identifying information such as the IP address, MAC address, cookie or other device-specific unique alphanumerical ID of your computer, but some stores may create guest IDs to go along with the data.

This data is used by companies to infer people’s age, gender, and possible purchase interests so that they could make customized ads that you would be more likely to click on. An example would be a user seen on football sites, business sites and male fashion sites. A reasonable guess would be to assume the user is male. Demographic analyses of individual sites provided either internally (user surveys) or externally (Comscore \ netratings) allow the networks to sell audiences rather than sites. Although advertising networks used to sell this product, this was based on picking the sites where the audiences were. Behavioral targeting allows them to be slightly more specific about this.

Privacy and security concerns
Many online users and advocacy groups are concerned about privacy issues around doing this type of targeting. This is a controversy that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to contain through education, advocacy and product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable or to obtain permission from end-users. AOL created animated cartoons in 2008 to explain to its users that their past actions may determine the content of ads they see in the future. Canadian academics at the University of Ottawa Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic have recently demanded the federal privacy commissioner to investigate online profiling of Internet users for targeted advertising.

In March 2011, it was reported that the online ad industry would begin working with the Council of Better Business Bureaus to start policing itself as part of its program to monitor and regulate how marketers track consumers online, also known as behavioral advertising.