As the holiday shopping season begins, reaching your target markets becomes more and more important. The best way to target consumers based on their online behavior is by using cookies. Cookies help advertisers reach the right audience with the right content, keeping Internet content free to users – which is something most people agree is good. But many consumers are against the collection of this data, feeling that their privacy is being violated. 

According to a recent TRUSTe study, “Consumers say they want relevant advertising, but don’t want to be tracked in order to get it: 57% say they are not comfortable with behavioral tracking even if it’s done anonymously.”  But only 40% of consumers surveyed were actually familiar with the term “behavioral targeting”. And, “nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) would choose to see online ads only from online stores and brands that they know and trust.” Online consumers obviously still need to be educated about cookie technology and how the data is collected and used by companies.

Back to Basics

A cookie is simply a small text file containing a string of characters, entered by your Web browser into the cookie folder on your computer’s hard drive. The cookies used for behavioral targeting merely capture non-identifying information, such as the date, the time, the Web site an ad was delivered on, a unique ID number for tracking purposes, etc.

These cookies do not track any personally identifiable information, such as name, address, social security number, credit card number, etc. The non-identifying information is also never sold or sent to other companies. And, disabling or deleting cookies will not protect users from viruses or other online threats.

Cookies are good!

If anything, cookies are key in tailoring the advertising experience for Web site visitors.

Without the frequency capping cookies provide, Web site visitors would repeatedly be shown the same ad over and over again. Without cookies, Web sites cannot provide custom content, such as news, stock prices, sports scores, or weather. Even shopping cart data is often maintained through cookies. And, without cookies, Web site users would need to remember all their online passwords – cookies are the underlying technology used for the ‘remember me’ mechanism used on many top Internet Web sites.

Instead, consumers would receive irrelevant ads that fail to address their personal interests and needs. Since the Internet is basically running on an ad-supported model, Web sites rely on ad dollars to support their business model in order to keep content and site usage free.