Behavioral Tracking or Voodoo?
The idea that watching which sites you visit allows someone to predict your purchasing behavior is a little like Voodoo. And each different behavioral tracking advertising vendor claims to have cracked the art and found the magic voodoo juju. But have they? I don’t think so.
Many advertisers believe that if they stick a needle in your leg (or set a browser cookie… hey, it’s a metaphor ok?) while you are shopping for a new cookbook, that tells them you want a cookbook and so they’ll nag you and nag you as you surf around the web trying to get you to go back to that site to buy more cookbooks. This is called re-targeting. But re-targeting almost never works. Especially when a particular re-targeter spans a large part of the web and you are hounded for cookbooks on every site you visit, many times with 2 or 3 ads per page. What it usually causes is resentment, not a conciliatory action that results in a purchase.
