Behavioral Targeting
For all the high falutin talk about ads as financial securities and proprietary behavioral algorithms that drive trading strategies: here is a story that is at once simplistic, scalable and very very effective.
Chitka, an ad network that shows products in ads, targets based upon the keyword that uses found the blog post or page with. That is, use the keyword disclosed on Google, and then use that to target ads on the second page of content, once the user has clicked through.
If you take the axiom that 30-50% of page views of blogs and other sites are referred from Google and Yahoo, then that is quite a large slice of inventory that can be precisely targeted.
You don’t need to run the ad targeting through servers of PHD level alogorithms, just take the fucking referring keyword, and see what products match it and link it to commerce providers who sell it.
Chitika is apparently deriving 2bn impressions a month from its ad network and ‘hundreds of millions’ of search driven targeted ads, not an insignificant amount.
All from standing on the shoulders of Google driven intent (the keyword is in the referral URL), and without any other pompous behavioral chatter.
