Modifying your ads based on visitor
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
One of the blogs I read regularly is ReadWriteWeb. I mainly read this blog because the authors are usually way ahead of the bell curve when it comes to issues around the web. They published a story today talking about the coming privacy issues and war that they predict will occur as result of those issues. Well doh, This has been coming for a long time. Its just made headline news with the recent busting of companies such as Facebook and Sears doing some fairly interesting items with user’s data. Perhaps this type of stuff has been done all along its just that now they are getting caught.
As long as there is money to be made on the web( which will be forever) then people will try to gain a competitive advantage through the use of data. Imagine an advertising system where a visitor was instantly identified when they visited a site and data was analyzed on their past purchasing history. Then the site layout was modified dynamically to similar layouts of sites where you have made purchases previously. Or certain ads where shown to you for products you where likely to purchase based on what you purchased before.
It does not take a brain surgeon to figure it if one could figure it out 
that this would be some powerfully effective advertising and conversions would definitely increase.
Now we are not quite there yet, mainly because companies do not have enough data and the database apps are not efficient enough to find it quick enough for the billions and billions of records such a system would need to process to make correct decisions, but we may be before long.
With the advent of more high level programming languages for web applications such as Asp.Net and Web services, this type of application becomes more of a reality. How much would Advertiser’s pay to own such an application. Well its safe to say who ever builds it won’t have to work again nor will their children or their children’s children. Google, Microsoft, IBM, and definitely Facebook and Sears would be beating down your door begging for a meeting.
Well enough of my rambling, but this is some interesting food for thought. I may have to start working on picking up my programming skills a little more. Well a lot more because while I can envision such a system, I definitely am not qualified to write one. I would not even know how to start to develop the ERD for the database and I aced the database classes in college.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Although I can’t remember the name of the company that does it - it is the company that associatedcontent uses. I contacted them to find out if I could use their service on my site - but I found out they only work with sites that receive in excess of 500k page views per month and have more than about 50k unique visitors.
So I can’t do it quite yet - but I will soon… It seems like they rotate around a lot of ads and see which ones work for each demographic and then serve that ad.