Behavioral Advertising : Targeted Ads by Tracking Surfing Habits

There has been a lot of buzz that behavioral advertising converts better than contextual ad targeting. But privacy issues and lack of a major publisher program using it till now have kept it on a low profile.

Jennifer Slegg takes an indepth look at Search Engine Watch -

What exactly is behavioral targeting? This refers to advertising that is targeted to a specific individual based on that user’s previous surfing behavior. This is quite different from the more common targeting method of displaying ads matched to the specific content of an individual page or to all users in general. With behavior targeting, this would mean that two people could see vastly different ads when viewing the identical webpage at the same time.

There is a possibility of getting better targeted ads if they tracked my surfing behaviour rather than contextual keyword targeted ads. But if you are really concerned about privacy protection (for which you resort to deleting all those web browser cookies, not accept third party cookies, use spyware cleaners, daily clear cache and have zero surfing history), would you mind if websites tracked your surfing habits to give you more useful ads… but I suppose behavioral targeting features will be popular soon once a big publisher program uses it.