Is Your Favorite Brand Following You Around The Web? Yup…

Ever notice how you go onto your favorite retail or hotel site and the next thing you know…wherever you go on the Internet, there they are? You’re not being gas-lighted, your being retargeted. (Aka ‘Behavioral Display Marketing). For those who aren’t familiar with retargeting, here’s how it works: You go to a website, let’s say JCrew.com, and browse around.  While you’re there a JavaScript drops a cookie or several cookies. When you leave the website and surf around the greater Internet, you receive banner ads for JCrew (sound familiar?). That’s because those cookies are registered with display advertising brokers who are given bid amounts to pay publishers (like Yahoo, or your favorite news site) to market to you. When you then go to YahooMail, CNN news, NYTimes and the like  (‘the publisher’), the publisher notifies the broker that you’re there and “auctions” off that advertising space to the highest bidder.  99% of the time, you won’t click through the ad but merely “view” it, but the advertiser sees value in that as well. To encourage click-thrus, ads may be optimized by dynamically creating an ad based on the product you looked at or put into your shopping cart. Sometimes three or four retargeters are at work concurrently. But like everything else these days…Google owns the retargeting market.

To learn more: googleretargeting.com/