Advertisers hardly need any data for tracking profile
Online marketers only need a list of 50 to 150 consumers' favorite websites to create a unique advertising tracking profile of them. This makes it easy for them to identify Internet users again and again and track them with ads. This is the result of a study by Mozilla.
"It is particularly important for brands to recognize potential target groups online and advertise specifically to them. Tracking makes it possible to understand their customer journey and purchasing behavior. However, this often annoys customers, which can damage the brand. The balancing act between too little and too much advertising is the biggest challenge facing marketers today. There is no silver bullet here, so a lot of tact is required," marketing expert Felix Murbach tells the news portal Press release.
More than 52,000 Firefox users took part in the study and provided anonymous browser data. In total, the IT researchers analyzed information from 35 million website visits on 660,000 individual domains. Using the data, they attempted to create user profiles that were as accurate as possible, the accuracy of which they checked in a test run.
Not much data required
With a data set of 50 frequently visited websites, the research team was able to create profiles that could recognize their individual users with a probability of 50 percent. With a data set of 150 domains, this probability rose to 80 percent. According to the authors of the study, marketers do not need a lot of information to keep track of consumers. This is true even if no user names are available. (pte)
