faulker046

Last week I wrote about a browser plug-in that will allow people to opt-out of the Google Analytics cookie . The release of this plug-in seems to be a proactive step towards another announcement. Eric Peterson, on his blog, voiced his opinion on why Google is rolling out this plug-in . I think Eric has a point in his post about Google trying to make a push into Federal Government web sites and this roll out is a check-box to satisfy the needs of privacy advocates. However, I am still not entirely clear on what Google will get if it can’t use all the data that it will collect on Federal Government website? It won’t be able to use in any way…well maybe at an aggregate level to compete with the likes of ComScore . So what do I think the reason is? Behavioral Targeting I think the real answer to Google Analytics’ rolling out Opt-out is “ Behavioral Targeting ”. Google Analytics is deployed on thousands of websites and collects a wealth of data. However, so far this data is used by ind...

This week Google Adwords announced that it is rolling out a feature called "Remarketing" . This feature is essentially "Retargeting" which I described in my blog post Retargeting 101 How does it work? You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done with that site. Few minutes later you go back to your computer and browse to another site, say a news site. As the page of that site loads so does an Ad that is from the site that you visited yesterday (where you looked at some products but did not buy). For Google Remarketing to work, the news site will need to be a part of Google content network. So far Google used to show Adsense ads based on the content of the page but now it will start showing ads that match the interest of the person viewing the page (as identified by a cookie and retargeted by a market...