What a Pixel and Cookie Can Reveal
A laundry list of what marketers can learn from a pixel and its accomplice, the cookie.
A laundry list of what marketers can learn from a pixel and its accomplice, the cookie.
While I was researching this column series, Chris Vanderhook, cofounder and COO of Specific Media, shared a fascinating example with me. He told me the hypothetical story of an auto dealer who had trucks that had to be sold. The dealer couldn’t find more prospects through search marketing, but behavioral marketing techniques could. For example, the dealer could target ads to prospects visiting from Orange County, CA, who listen to country music. That country music was on the palette of behavioral data was a surprise. I wanted to know exactly what data could be gleaned from visitor behavior to help advertisers serve more relevant ads at the right time to the right people.
I decided to put it all on the table. With the following information, you, the marketer, can decide if there is something valuable in this data. Likewise, you can decide if there’s anything here that makes you uncomfortable.
Realize that ad networks and publishers don’t generally use these data in its raw form. They use them to find patterns — patterns that indicate whether a surfer is in the market for your product or service. To this end, they’ve developed a baffling set of technologies with important sounding names, like linguistic analysis, taxonomies, semantic profiling, URL normalization, and cookies.
Can ad networks track visitors on any site they visit? No, a special agent is required, an insider that will relay to them information about page visits. This mole is a single, invisible pixel, and from this small digital seed an entire tree of information springs. While cookies seem to get all of the bad press, a cookie is really just a tracking tool, a homing beacon that helps ad networks and publishers aggregate information as a surfer moves from page to page and site to site.
The counterbalance to the covert power of the pixel is a healthy fear of personally identifiable information (PII). PII is the third rail of behavioral marketing, and the behavioral professionals I’ve spoken to avoid it like the plague. If you get caught using PII without user permission, your reputation will be in jeopardy and you’ll probably be investigated by the authorities, although laws regarding ethical use of PII seem to be in the oven still.
“ZAG” is enough, says Joe Apprendi, CEO of digital marketing firm Collective Media. ZAG stands for Zip Code, age, and gender. This information tells marketers enough about a surfer to decide which ads to serve, if any. The pixel doesn’t deliver ZAG, however. ZAG comes from trusted publishers who sell non-PII data to ad networks and marketers.
Another limiting factor is the sheer amount of data. The pixel may be small, but the data it collects multiplied over millions of users and billions of page views would fill more drive space and take more processor power than is profitably useful, at least for now.
The following list is only meant to make you aware of what’s being collected. Your research will define the terms and help you draw conclusions about their use. Please let me know what I’ve left out by sending me a comment.
The pixel delivers a list of basic attributes, many of which your IT guy will have to explain. These basic attributes include:
The pixel can also pass along just about any information that the browser knows:
The URL provides the entire content of the page visited by the surfer:
The IP address can be used to look up more information:
By adding a cookie, surfer data can be aggregated over time, and more can be inferred about visitor behaviors:
With a little number crunching even more conclusions can be drawn:
If you aren’t careful, you will quickly get drawn into a world of acronyms:
Once we get ZAG, we can start to segment visitors more accurately:
And when we integrate this information with other non-PII databases, we can learn even more:
It’s amazing what we can learn from a pixel and its accomplice, the cookie. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get to the most burning of all questions: do they listen to country music? Now we know.