04/27/19 TRACKING WHO SURFS WHERE

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TRACKING WHO SURFS WHERE

The Internet hasn't delivered on one-to-one marketing--yet. But a raft of services are becoming ever more sophisticated in helping advertisers target ads and track their effectiveness. ''We're constantly learning more about which eyeballs are going where,'' says Norman Lehoullier, managing director at ad agency Grey Interactive Worldwide.
To do this, advertisers rely on a variety of services. They mix and match the ratings information from companies such as Media Metrix Inc. with data from other companies such as Excite Inc.'s MatchLogic, or AdKnowledge. These services let advertisers and Web-site operators serve up ads to specific audiences and then assess the response.
FOLLOW THE LINKS. How is the information used? Ask Fragrance Counter, a Brentwood (N.Y.)-based cosmetics retailer, which during the past two quarters used ratings info from Media Metrix and RelevantKnowledge to select sites that were popular with women. Fragrance Counter then added its proprietary technology to figure out how successful its ads were.
The result: Ads linked to keyword searches, such as ''perfume'' or ''Estee Lauder,'' as well as to the shopping areas on search engines, were among the most effective. Ads in the Yahoo! Inc. shopping area, for example, had a ''click rate,'' or percentage of people who clicked on the ad, of 4%--compared with less than 1% in the Yahoo! local-content area. And the percentage of people who bought a product was 3% in the Yahoo! shopping guide, vs. less than 1% in the local-content area. ''From what we've learned, we'll pay significant cash for the placement we want,'' says Eli Katz, vice-president for marketing at Fragrance Counter.
Still, the information advertisers can get is limited. Most of the ad-tracking services are confined to collecting such data as which browser a cybernaut uses and what country he or she lives in. That's pretty slim, although it does the trick for technology news service CNET Inc., which uses such data to target Windows-based-software ads at Windows 95 users. Another way to aim ads is through a method called ''context''--monitoring the overall content a cybernaut is viewing and serving up ads accordingly. If someone is searching on the keyword ''car,'' for example, a General Motors Corp. ad might pop up.
Getting precise demographic information is the most difficult. That's because it's still hard to get wary consumers to provide personal data such as age, income, and sex. One way Excite is attacking that problem is by running online sweepstakes--a gimmick that puts cybernauts in the running for prizes like vacations to Florida in exchange for personal information. ''This helps advertisers introduce more knowledge into their decisions,'' says Craig Donato, Excite's vice-president for database marketing.
Other services are attacking the problem more broadly by trying to track usage across many sites. CMG Information Services Inc.'s Engage plans later this month to introduce an ambitious service called Engage.Knowledge, which will start off with 10 million profiles of Web users. These profiles will be collected from a host of sites, including search engine Lycos Inc., that monitor usage on their Web sites. The data collected by Engage.Knowledge can be sliced into 800 categories, including sports and hobbies, for advertisers and Web-site operators. It's far from advertising nirvana, but it's one step closer.
By Heather Green in New York

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