The online ad industry and lobby better stop saying that cookies and other forms of data collection aren’t personally identifiable–so-called PII [personally identifiable information]. As we know, behavioral targeting (BT) identifies, profiles, tracks and targets an individual. Here’s just one example of how online marketers discuss what BT really is when they are talking among themselves and to clients (our emphasis):
What is behavioral targeting?
Behavioral targeting is a technique used by online advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns by increasing the relevance of product offers and promotions on a visitor-by-visitor basis.
Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select and deliver online ads to the users who are most likely to be interested…As the effective mixing and mining of audience data has become increasingly important to online advertisers, the role of behavioral targeting and retargeting have grown more central…The typical approach to behavioral targeting starts by using web analytics to group visitors into discrete channels. Each channel is analyzed and a virtual profile is created to for each channel…
Most platforms identify visitors by assigning a unique id cookie to each and every visitor to the site, allowing them to be tracked throughout their web journey. An example is a user who visits content about auto insurance, clicks on an insurance advertiser button or banner, and then searches for “auto insurance.†This user would be assigned to the insurance prospect channel and the next time that user goes to Yahoo they will see ad for insurance…
