Google today announced it’s push into the behavioral targeting space (good explanation of BT here).
Some would say this is long overdue (which it is). And good for Google. This will have a material impact on margins, publisher payouts, ad response and subsequently each parties (advertisers, publishers and users) earnings and revenue.
Susan Wojcicki at Google said as early as 2007 that “We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user’s search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at…” What this means is that Google thought that the most important indicator of the intent of a user on any given site was the search query they typed into Google 30 seconds earlier and took them to the page they are currently looking at. For transactional based queries (i.e. “new nike shoes” or “cheap digital cameras”) – that works, and very well. But then they purchased DoubleClick. And importantly: Google could now access DoubleClick cookies (some estimates peg doubleclick cookies reaching 70% of the internet).
However – for transactions with a longer time horizon, or non-transactional behavior; that paradigm breaks down. This is where BT comes in. There are tons of user behaviors that advertisers can use to better identify what a user is interested in (i.e. user visits Trulia.com, then zillow.com – they are likely interested in real estate, and a good candidate for a mortgage ad or an ad for a new condo).
Google has also said that they although they store search data for over 48 hours, they only use recent search data for ad targeting (if anyone has any material indicating otherwise, please drop it in the comments). However – they still store that search data.
So Google can now target ads via search queries (which they have been doing forever); via BT (likely with some sort of integration with Doubleclick cookies); and can possibly put together a fairly comprehensive picture of what any one person has done online for the past 30 days by layering in all search query data on top of the 2 aforementioned data sources.
There are privacy implications to all this, and I don’t expect the FTC to idly stand by (they seem to want to get invlolved in the BT debate at any cost, although they did give the industry a chance to self-regulate). I hope that Google’s move isn’t the straw that finally forces the FTC to act.
Because I, for one, welcome our Google overlords.
More discussion at TechCrunch, here; and AllThingsD.
