January 27, 2009 Comments (5)
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Image by she_ra via Flickr
Many marketers are asking me about personalized marketing, which you should expect to see more and more of in the next few years. We've already seen behavioral targeting in display ads and personalized search, and we'll see more personalized advertising emerge. But are we marketers just assuming that users will allow all this personalized marketing in? What if they clean their cookies regularly? Will that prevent those users from being exposed to personalized ads?
These are good questions. To answer them, we need to understand a bit about how personalization on the Web works. You can expect that any personalized approach depends on at least one of three basic techniques:
So, how does cleaning cookies affect these types of personalization techniques?
Behavioral targeting generally depends on a combination of cookies and IP detection. If users are blocking cookies (ensuring they are never set), that would affect behavioral targeting a great deal. If they are cleaning cookies, it would erase the memory that behavioral targeting depends on, but behavioral targeting could work in between cleanings.
Search personalization generally depends on User IDs and IP detection, but uses cookies to remember the User IDs so that users are automatically signed in. Cleaning cookies means that personalized search would not work until users signed in again. Because the act of searching itself does not require signing in, users might not sign in until they want to see their Gmail or their Yahoo! Finance page.
Personalization can use many different methods, of which cookies enable just some. Personalized marketing is coming, even for those who clean or even block cookies.
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Mike is an expert in search marketing, search technology, publishing, Web personalization, and Web metrics, who regularly makes speaking appearances.
Mike's previous appearances include Search Engine Strategies, AD:TECH, Consumer Reports WebWatch, OMMA East, and the Enterprise Search Summit.
Mike also writes the Biznology newsletter and blog, is the co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc., and writes the search marketing column for Revenue Magazine.
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