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I recently moved to Calgary, Alberta and was a victim, for lack of a better word, of some behaviorally targeted advertising. Lately I have been using Google Maps like crazy to find directions to grocery stores, movie theatres, IKEA and banks. Calgary is a fairly large city so Google Maps has been really useful in helping my wife and I find our way around.
Like other guys, I really enjoy sports, so I often read the top stories at the Sports Illustrated website to keep on top of things. The other day I was reading about how Andrea Jaeger said in an interview with a British newspaper that she purposely lost the 1983 Wimbledon final to Martina Navratilova. I don’t follow women’s tennis very closely but suffice to say, I love controversial stories.
While I was reading, my eyes glanced over to see a relatively large, image ad from Circuit city – “Find the Perfect GPS.” I actually thought, how convenient and clicked on the ad to find out more information. It was genius, they hit me with advertising based on my web history and on a site where I very often frequent. They could have gone a step further by doing an IP look-up and showed me all the stores near my area, but it was a great attempt nevertheless. Would I have given any attention to the ad if I was not intersted in driving directions, probably not and I probably would have never seen this advertisement on sites I visit once or twice a month.
How do you think the Circuit City ad was devised to implement these functions? Specific analytics functions? Can you elaborate, as I’m pretty new to analytics and I didn’t really understand what it clicked to.