Magazine

Knowing too much

How well do you know your audience?

When dealing with your online audience, you may not know them at all. You will have an idea of from where they visit your site, how often they come and how long they stay. But you likely don’t know a great deal about them personally.

But if they subscribe to your site or connect their web presence with an offline form of viewership, you likely know much more. You may know their name, e-mail, mailing address, age and gender. From that, you can likely figure out their approximate income level, likely interests and much more.

Most of this information gathering has been familiar to media outlets, especially subscription-based ones for many years. The Internet has created new opportunities to get to know an audience, including many ways that have made many potential customers uneasy and led to protests, boycotts and other forms of public backlash.

It is important, when maintaining a web presence, to realise that it is good to have some distance from your audience. Knowing them too well could put them ill at ease.

Getting personal

Throughout the history of media and especially over the last century, advertisers have constantly sought ways to better target their messages. Media outlets have, generally, been very happy to help.

However, for the most part, this honing has involved a combination of research (focus groups, surveys, etc.) and niche marketing. The desire to improve the quality of the audience has driven media organisations and advertisers alike to find new ways to label and target those that they feel will generate more revenue.

But while all of this analysis has been very detailed and methodical, it has always been very macro in nature, targeting groups of people, not individuals.

The Internet, however, has given every user a personal connection to the world around them. This connection can be tracked and the information that is gleaned from it can be used to target advertising and information to the person, not just their age group or income level.

This information could, theoretically, be used to better target ads to users. For example, if a user regularly searches for bike paths and bicycle parts, they are more likely to be interested in ads about cycling than most others.

Some advertisers, such as Google Adsense, already do this to a degree, looking at the text in the page that the user is on and returning ads relevant to the content. However, others want to get even closer to the user and look at not just the site they are on, but their entire history.

This has many consumers upset. Some have taken to the streets in protest.

Bad Phorm

The idea behind Phorm is very simple. It partners with Internet Service Providers and gains access to their central computers. From there, Phorm tracks the clickstream, meaning the trail of websites a user visits, of that ISP’s customers. Phorm uses that information to sell advertising targeted at the individual.

Phorm, for their part, claims that they do not know any identifying information about the consumers. Instead, they say, Phorm assigns them a unique number to track them. Also, Phorm claims not to preserve browsing history but, instead, have a cookie that represents how the service interprets your interests.

However, this has not abated critics of the service. One says, “There will be little of your life Webwise/Phorm will not know about. They may bundle it all up and assign you to a demographic segment. But that cookie on your PC will disclose your likes and dislikes, and it could be used to work out who you are.”

Despite the criticisms and concerns, Phorm went ahead with trials with several key British ISPs in 2006 and 2007, trials many say were illegal under British privacy laws. This has led to protests at ISP headquarters and an outcry from many of the customers.

While the controversy over Phorm is currently targeted at the service itself and the ISPs who have helped them, it only stands to reason that, should it go far enough, advertisers and content partners could also be caught up, making this service, as well as others like it, a major risk.

Piecing the puzzle together

Most users understand that, as they surf the web, their steps are tracked. For example, when they visit Google, they expect that Google knows when they visited, what they searched for and, most likely, what link they clicked.

But while that is understood, most don’t expect Google to know what they did while they were on MSN or any other unrelated site. This carves their Internet history into a puzzle, one where many different companies each hold a piece. No one source, save their ISP, has access to it all.

When companies, such as Doubleclick did several years ago, try to compile information from multiple sites and get more pieces of the puzzle, there is almost always protest and concern from consumers. This can result in both public relations problems and, in the case of Doubleclick, an attempt by users to prevent the tracking.

This can create serious problems for content creators and advertisers alike, negating the benefits of such technology. If the backlash is severe enough, it costs the companies involved money.

Better tracking

It is important for websites, especially those that collect information from visitors, to take steps to ensure users privacy and maintain the trust of those who visit. To do so, companies should consider taking the following steps:

• Have a privacy policy: Even if it is not legally required in your country, have a privacy policy that clearly outlines information collected, how it is used, who it is shared with and how it is protected is important for customer peace of mind.
• Partner with ethical advertisers: If you use outside advertising networks, ensure that they are collecting only reasonable amounts of information, provide their own privacy policies and do not use information gleaned from your site to target ads on another.
• Have visitors volunteer information: All information collecting should be opt-in. Registration forms, e-mail newsletter subscriptions and surveys are all great ways to get users to volunteer information about themselves without raising privacy concerns. Never purchase e-mail lists and databases.
• Don’t spam: If you collect e-mail addresses and send out updates to them, make getting on the list a double opt-in: meaning, the user signs up and then confirms their address. Offer an easy way for them to remove themselves and warn them if a list is high volume, meaning more than one or two messages per days.
• Never well or share customer data: Ensure that your customer information stays within your company. Although sharing collective figures is common practice, ensure that anything unique to the visitor is kept secret.

The reason to do this is simple: Sites that earn a reputation for not respecting user privacy lose visitors. If people do not feel they can trust your web presence, they will opt to go somewhere they feel comfortable.

It is important to make sure that your site is trusted. Continuously build the relationship, not just so that users will return, but so that they will trust you with the information that you need to do business.

Conclusions

On the web, trust is everything. While it is important to obey your country’s privacy laws, it is at least equally important to ensure that your users feel safe visiting your site and trust you with their information. This often means going well above and beyond what the law requires.

Although this means that many of the web’s most tempting information collection tools are off limits, it is important to note that the traditional means of learning about your customers still work well. There is little evidence to support the idea that such heavy personalisation actually improves advertising effectiveness.

At the moment, there seems to be little that can be gained but a great deal that can be lost by peering too deep into your visitor’s history. As tempting as it might be to know them better - by any means available - doing so may cause them to distance themselves from you on a more permanent basis.

Besides, no one wants to be tracked. It makes little sense to subject visitors to something we would not want to endure ourselves.

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Flickr photos from users felipetrucco and cgines, respectively.

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