I read a press release this morning from Yahoo saying that they will no longer have a “do not track” setting in their internet browser due to “lack of industry standard.” And it reminded me that from time to time clients ask me what the “do not track” controversy is about and if it concerns them.
Let me make this clear: there are A LOT of people that misunderstand what “do not track” and what the controversy is about.
“Do not track” has to do with a technique in website banner advertising known as “remarketing” aka “retargeting” aka “retagging”. When you go to a website, like nordstrom.com, most likely, Nordstrom’s is doing remarketing. Remarketing gives Nordstrom’s the ability to put a cookie in the web browser on your device so they can stay in contact with you serving banner ads to you on websites and mobile apps with the banner ad network Nordstrom’s uses.
A lot of people think “do not track” has to do with companies tracking which websites people go on, giving them the ability to look over your shoulder. This is not the case and does not happen.
The problem is that the industry has allowed the politicians to call this controversy “do not track” just to get attention. It’s a horrible way of defining the situation because then people think that they’re being tracked or followed. A more appropriate way to define the situation is “custom advertising” or “stay in contact advertising.”
People are going to see banner ads on websites no matter what. Remarketing doesn’t cause people to see an increased amount of banner ads. Do people get annoyed sometimes when they see the same company showing the same banner ad over and over again, 20 times a day? Yes. But marketers are smartening up to knowing that showing their banner ad over and over again to people in the same day, annoying them is bad for business.
At Customwave, when we do remarketing, we set a “frequency cap” at 2 views per day. Meaning that people we do remarketing to, we don’t show our clients banner ad more than 2 times per day to each person. This way, our clients banner ads blend in with all the other banner ads and people don’t get annoyed.
Remarketing can be a double edged sword, because when you annoy people by showing the banner ads too much, you’re spending money to damage your brand. And obviously you don’t want to do that ; )