Want a challenge? Try our free online games. Say you're browsing the virtual shelves of an online clothing store. You move a blue shirt into your shopping cart. Then you decide against it and click over to a news story.
You've left the store, yet the blue shirt is trailing you. There it is, on an ad from your local news site. Days later, you open Facebook, and there it is again. The same blue shirt. How did Facebook know?
The phenomenon is called "behavioral retargeting. For advertisers, it's a home run. Turn-of-the-century businessman John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
Once a store knows you like the blue shirt, why not offer a gentle reminder of it? On average, you see 1, banner ads a month.
You probably ignore them all, but you might notice that shirt again. The question is, how did anyone know you liked that shirt, and are you OK with them knowing that? Here's how retargeting works: Each time you visit a site, it drops something called a "cookie" on to your Web browser.
That cookie, which can stay for up to a month, is anonymous. The site doesn't know who you are, or anything about you, but it knows you looked at that shirt. Then the site can purchase ads through a number of retargeting companies acting as middlemen, selling the ads aimed at you, the anonymous shopper, on behalf of news sites, blogs and even Facebook. The practice has become increasingly widespread because it works. In a survey of clients by San Francisco-based retargeting company Adroll, 74 percent said their retargeting ads performed better than regular banner ads.
For that reason, retargeted ads can cost as much as three times more. Facebook and Twitter have recently started selling retargeted ads, so that ads inside their social networks can target you based on your activity across the Web.
For all the talk of effectiveness and relevancy, retargeting can backfire. All rights reserved. For reprint rights. Times Syndication Service. Rounak Jain. Companies use ads to attract buyers, while websites which show these ads generate revenue from your clicks. These companies and websites use code snippets to make sure they display relevant ads to buyers. Ads are how most online publications make money. It can also seem downright creepy when the same ads follow you around on the internet.
From there, the ad tech companies can follow your cookie through trackers and ad networks on various sites and apps to serve you an ad for the blender. Hofstetter said that among ad tech companies, there are good actors and bad actors. The good ones will try to minimize the chances of annoying you by showing you the blender ad only a few times and stopping if they detect that you made the purchase. The bad ones only care to persuade you to buy the blender, so they will relentlessly serve you the ad and not bother to determine whether you already bought it.
Things get extra messy when brands employ multiple ad tech companies that employ different approaches. Perhaps one ad company finished serving you the blender ad after a few times on Facebook. But elsewhere on the web or inside another app, another ad tech company served you that same ad endlessly. Here are a few simple steps you can take if you are being pestered by an ad and want that to end:. Ad trackers will have a tougher time following you around if you delete your cookies on each of your devices.
Apple, Google and Microsoft have published instructions on how to clear data for their browsers Safari, Chrome and Edge.
In addition to cookies, Android and Apple phones use a so-called advertising ID to help marketers track you. You can reset it whenever you want. On Android devices, you can find the reset button in the ads menu inside the Google settings app, and on iPhones, you can find the reset button inside the settings app in the privacy menu, under advertising.
Google offers the My Activity tool, myactivity. On some web ads, like those served by Google and Facebook, there is a tiny button in the top-right corner that you can click on to hide the ad. There are more extreme methods to take if you want to prevent targeted ads from ever following you around. For your web browser, you can install add-ons that block ads. For Android users, Google banned many ad blockers from its official Play app store, so the simplest way to block ads is by using a private web browser.
Firefox Focus, DuckDuckGo and Ghostery Privacy Browser are privacy-centric mobile browsers that include built-in ad and tracker blocking. These are handy when you want to do a discreet web search.
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