MetaMuse

Google Targeting Ads by Credit Score

Neal forwarded me the MediaPost article "Google Tries Hand At Targeting Consumers With Good Credit" which describes how Google has been testing the ability to lay consumer FICO scores on top of its Google Content Network to identify/target people with good credit. Some interesting takeaways:

• will be offered to Google text and display advertisers.
• partnered with Compete.com and their panel of 2M opt-in users, which means it will not be "explicit" FICO score information but rather paneled data (Web sites which index well for high credit scores). Compete's sister company integrated the FICO data with searches done by participating consumers who applied for a credit card between January and March 2009.
• According to their marketing person, "Google's Content Network can reach 70% of credit card applicants with a high FICO score, 87% of mortgage applicants with a high FICO score, and 90% of the people who visit small business sites who have a high FICO score."
• Consumers with high FICO scores use non-branded search terms more than branded -- approximately 60% of high FICO searchers.

Top Search Advertisers on Google

Interesting stats found this morning at AdQuants, a company that does a lot of SEM analysis. They list the top advertisers for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft by number of advertisements, and by average daily ad spend.

What's most interesting to me is the volume of ad arbitrage revenues Google takes in. I looked at the top 100 advertisers on Google (by daily ad spend) and did a quick SWAG on how much is pure ad arbitrage (they advertise to get traffic, which they monetize thru ads themselves) or affiliate arbitrage (they advertise to get traffic, which they monetize thru affiliate relationships), versus real businesses (United, Nordstrom, HomeDepot, Chase, etc.). Based on this rough analysis, appears that:

• >19% of Google's ad revenues are based on pure ad arbitrage.
• >39% of Google's ad revs are based on affiliate arbitrage.
• Which would mean that the majority of Google's ad revenues are based on arbitrage! For instance, AOL, Yahoo and Ask.com are all in the top 12 advertisers.

Full lists below. And if you click on the links, AdQuants gives you more info.

Current State of Web Privacy, Data Collection, and Information Sharing

Very interesting research report at KnowPrivacy.org on the current state of web privacy, data collection, and information sharing. The project was to compare users' expectations of privacy online and the data collection practices of web sites, identify specific practices that may be harmful or deceptive and attract the attention of government regulators, and to produce recommendations for policymakers.

The key takeaways for me were:

• Users are concerned about data collection online (duh!), want greater control over their personal information, yet lack the awareness or initiative to do anything about it. (I found it interesting that the report seemed to focus on personally-identifiable information (PII) and not distinguish that from non-PII.)
• Web bugs/beacons are ubiquitous.  All of the top 50 websites contained at least one web bug at some point in a one month time period. Some had as many as 100.
• Google is the dominant player in the tracking market; it operates the top three trackers and four of the top 10. Among the top 100 websites this project focused on, Google Analytics appeared on 81 of them. When combined with the other trackers it operates (AdSense, DoubleClick, FriendConnect, etc.), Google was on 92 of the top 100 websites and 348,059 of 393,829 distinct domains reviewed -- that's 88.4% reach across the Web!!
• Most of the top 50 websites collect information about users and use it for customized advertising.

Other various data points and comments I noted:

• The number of user complaints made to the various organizations is extremely low relative to the number of Internet users. The FTC had only 6,713 for five years (in the General Privacy category), the PRC had 2,202 for the same period and the COPP had 1,152. TRUSTe had 7,041 that it categorized as privacy related. The largest numbers of complaints at all four of the institutions we received data from were concerned with public displays of personally-identifiable information.
• Only 23 of the top 50 affirmatively stated that users could have access to some portion of the information the website had collected about them. The remaining 27 policies lacked mention of access or their statements about access were unclear. None of them explicitly offered users the ability to view or delete click stream data.
• The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) currently has an opt-out mechanism that requires users to download a cookie, which will let direct advertisers know not to install any third-party tracking cookies on the user‘s computer. This method of opt-out is unacceptable. First, it only governs members of the NAI; tracking companies that are not members will still be able to use cookies and web bugs to collect data about users. Second, users that delete cookies on their machine may delete the NAI cookie inadvertently and open up their machine to third-party tracking again.
• Only 27 of the top 100 Web sites provided a P3P policy, and only a subset of those were valid according to the P3P standard.

The final recommendations as a result of the research?

• Regulation by which both websites and third-party trackers must allow users to see all the data that has been collected about them, not just user-provided information. Additionally, users should also be allowed to see with whom their data has been shared.
• That companies request permission from users before sharing data about them with any outside party, regardless of affiliation.
• Privacy policies should be readable for average users.
• Users be given clear and proper notice as to whom the data will be passed, regardless of affiliation or method of sharing.
• That the practice of third-party tracking be made more transparent.
• That the FTC create an opt-in standard for enhancement -- the practice of buying information about users from outside sources.
• That all browser developers provide a Ghostery-like function in their browsers that alerts users to the presence of third-party trackers.