Interest-based stalking (oops, I mean advertising)

A little background: On March 12, 2009 I received an email from Google about my Adsense account (since I’m a publisher). The subject was “Introducing interest-based advertising – action required for your AdSense account“. They sum it up best in the body of the email, which I’ll just quote here:

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser web site and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

When I read that I had a mixed reaction. Of course I want to monetize my web sites, but like Paul Meyers mentions about sidewiki and the overall Google infrastructure, they have access to a lot of information. In some ways, Google knows more about what I’m thinking than my wife does. For example, I use www.google.com search, GMail, picasa, Google Apps for my domain, google docs, Adsense, Adwords, youtube, and probably a few other Google services that I can’t remember right now. They record what I search for, they store my emails, etc. They have a lot of information about me, and their license agreement (you know that thing you never read because you don’t have a law degree or an extra hour in your day) spells out how they can use all that information. Turns out some of it might surprise you.

So what does this have to do with Google stalking me? Yesterday I was visiting a few sites of interest to me and quickly noticed that they were all showing banner ads for the same company (see screenshots below). I might not have taken notice, except that the company they were advertising had ZERO logical relation to the site I was visiting. There was no context and no relevance.

I did a little more digging and found that the banners were all showing inside Google Adsense blocks. I decided to run a little experiment to see if Google really was stalking me. I started from the site where I first noticed the irrelevant ad and went on to visit sites that I know/own, and that have Adsense. I then started trying to find sites that have the least amount to do with the ad I was being shown to see if the ad followed me.

PRWeb and riding lawn mowers

The ad was for PRWeb, and I’m not sure how the Google Adsense network could know about my interest in PRWeb just from my surfing habits or how many other bits of my information they infiltrated to make that connection. It’s also surprising that they would be so blatant in their display of those ads when they’re not contextually relevant to the sites that I visited. Finally, I wonder if PRWeb knows that Google is showing their ad on riding lawn mower review web sites to someone (me) that just published an article bringing into question the value of the PRWeb service.

So, here’s the list of sites that I visited. In case you’re interested I’ve included the search term I used to find the site (in Google) for those sites that I searched by topic. My aim was to visit sites that were as different as possible from each other to see how far Google would go in showing contextually irrelevant ads to me based on what it assumes my interests are.

• http://www.slavetosave.blogspot.com/
• http://www.runningshoesexpert.com/
• http://www.maintainfit.com/
• swimming pool blog: http://www.pool-help.com/
• online dating blog: http://www.onlinedatingnewsblog.com/
• guinea pigs blog: http://www.furrypal.blogspot.com/
• gardening blog: http://www.gardeningblog.net/
• calendar templates: http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-calendar-template.html

I took screen shots along the way so you could see how awkward their placement can be. Sometimes the text ads might go unnoticed, but the bright red and gray banners really stand out on a pink mommy’s coupon site.

Even after I got this collection of screen grabs I visited a few more sites and saw the PRWeb text ads and banners on every single site. It was really quite creepy!

Primary suspect: Google Chrome

At first I didn’t know exactly what Google was using to identify me or where they were pulling the information that suggests I would be an appropriate target for PRWeb ads so I did a few experiments.   All of the screen shots above were taken (and ads seen) while using Google Chrome.  In Firefox I saw only contextually relevant ads.  What does Chrome know that Firefox doesn’t?

To test this I opened a new incognito window in Chrome and visited the same sites. This time I saw only relevant ads and nothing about PRWeb. So it appeared that the Google was getting it’s tip from Chrome, but it turned out the same thing could have happened in any browser.

Cookies and the SQLite database

Just for kicks I went to another computer and used chrome to open up the sites and verify that I saw only contextually relevant ads, regardless of where I was logged in (e.g. Gmail in another tab).   The reason that I suspected this might work was because the incognito session prevented the stalking ads from being shown.   In order to understand this you need to understand a two things about how browsers manage information.

The first are cookies. These are small bits of text information stored on your computer. They can store information about your passwords, preferences, session IDs, etc. These values are intended to be domain specific.  That means your browser should only send information about specificdomain.com to the server when you are requesting information from specificdomain.com.  It should never send the specificdomain.com cookies to anotherdomain.com.

Next is that each browser has a database that holds information about what you’ve typed into forms, stored passwords, browsing history, etc. In Chrome and Firefox the underlying database is the fast, efficient SQLite engine. You can use an SQLite client and view and tweak these files by hand if you like. It might surprise you to see the amount of information your browser stores about you browsing habits.

So, when you run incognito (or private) in a browser you essentially bypass these two elements. Cookies are isolated to that session and destroyed when it exits. SQLite values are not recorded, such as browsing history and search terms. If I’m not mistaken, a private/incognito session also isolates you to some degree from other information already stored from non-incognito sessions.

Safe browsing

Since Google Chrome and Firefox both use the same basic stack which includes cookies and an SQLite database, I’m not sure that Google stalking me had as much to do with Chrome as it did with the fact that I had been using Chrome as my primary browser for a few months. So as a final experiment I went back to Chrome on my original PC and cleared all the cookies and all of the ads went back to being relevant and contextual.

To shed a little more light on this, Google has explained what cookies it uses and how the cookie value might have been set, although I somehow doubt that PRWeb had this in mind. Google sets cookies from any site that displays Adsense and uses those cookies to track an individual’s interests. Here’s what they say:

When users visit a partner’s web site and either view or click on an ad, a cookie may be dropped on that end user’s browser. The data gathered from these cookies will be used to help better serve and manage ads on the publisher’s site(s) and across the web.

Implications for Adwords Advertisers

So, if I clicked on a prweb ad on Google’s search page and that set a cookie showing that I was interested in Press Release submission services, now Google is going to show me ads about PRWeb on every site I ever visit. That could be both good and bad for an advertiser. In the case of PRWeb I had already purchased (and they already paid for my click). Google, however, doesn’t know or care whether you’ve already purchased a service, but they do know that you clicked on a certain ad and if you clicked it once, you’ll probably click it again.

Advertisers might end up spending a lot more on clicks, but they also might get “pre-qualified” traffic from the content network. This could make testing the content network a little trickier, since the content network has always been a bit of a crapshoot. Now if you start to target a site because you’re getting clicks there, it might not be due to any contextual relevance. Instead they might just have the cookie set and Google shows them what it thinks they’ll click. On the other hand, like Perry Marshall explains about right angle connections, you might just find an angle or some new keywords based on the sites where people go after (maybe a long time after) they first show interest in you by clicking one of your other ads.

Either way, this adds a lot of complexity and new variables into both the safe browsing discussion and the Google services for Adsense publishers and Adwords advertisers.

My conclusion from all of this is that I need to be more aware of how regular and useful information, like cookies, is used and have a plan to do some of my own cleanup along the way. I also question whether or not I have too many of my eggs in the Google basket.   Since I’m tied into so many of their services, it becomes more and more difficult to know when they might have crossed the line and compromised my privacy (which doesn’t have as much to do with their policy as my threshold for their tactics and approach).

Additional resources and links

In 134 comments on Google’s blog about the interest based advertising there is clear concern about this type of personalization. Some even go so far as to call it spyware.

Interest based advertising help center

And, to be perfectly up front, I don’t pretend to know anything about public relations. I’ve read a book and scoured the web, including some resources from PRWeb itself. I’m still exploring what will be effective, as you can tell by reading my recent discussion about the state of the newspaper industry.

The right timing

First I should mention timing. I think mine was off a little bit. The book I read about submitting press releases suggested that holidays, and especially the week between Christmas and New Year’s day, can be the best time to get press. The author of the book worked in television and from his book it seems the majority of the features he did were the same day. He did his research very early and went out to get the latest news as it happened (or as close to the time it happened as possible).

News may work differently from one medium to another, and it may even be very different from city to city. My experience with the Idaho Statesman (Boise/Idaho newspaper) has been that they plan much further ahead than same day for tomorrow’s article. From discussions with howdoesshe.com it would seem the local TV station (at least channel 6) plans ahead too. They may even keep a type of backup archive of stories to use when they don’t have enough “real news” to fill the time.

As a result of my reading, I planned to put out a number of press releases during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Another thing the book mentioned was that press releases get weeded out really quickly. News agencies and television stations have so many releases coming in every day that they only have a few seconds to decide whether or not to pass it on to a reporter. To account for this I also planned to send a series of press releases, each highlighting a different part of the program I was trying to publicize.

After some discussion with a very nice person at the newspaper, I now understand a few things that I think are really worth mentioning. First is that for the type of story I had and the type of article (write up) I got in the newspaper, more lead time would have been beneficial (more on this below about PRWeb). As it turns out, the paper had to work pretty hard to get me in when it did. The time from first press release to being in the paper was about seven days. I’m not sure if that is average lead time, but that’s about right for the two times I was in the paper. If I had given them an extra week of lead time, I might have gotten a better feature or had a chance to talk to a reporter and have an individual article. It’s no guarantee, but more time might have increased the chances.

Another bit of useful feedback I got was that from the multiple press releases I sent in, they had a hard time knowing exactly what to feature. So instead of trashing all but the most interesting, all of my press releases made it to the same person that would have to write about the program creating a 7-11 candy bar problem. Don’t you remember being seven years old with two warm quarters clenched in your little clammy palm staring at the seemingly endless choices of candybars at 7-11? I think there may have been times that I deliberated for an hour about the best purchase to make… I’m not sure if this strategy would have worked better in a different situation, city or medium, but in this case it probably wasn’t necessary.

Newspaper vs. television

Another interesting point is that while I have been successful at getting the attention of the local newspaper, I haven’t gotten any response from the TV stations. I actually expected this based on the book I read. The author, Jeff Crilley explains that a TV station wants something that is visually appealing and lends itself to video. They don’t want a talking head or a screenshot. That also explains why channel 6 picked up the howdoesshe.com group. They have put a lot of effort into both making cute stuff and taking good pictures of it.

One thing I’ll never know is whether or not my press releases made it into the hands of a reporter that never did anything with them or whether they got weeded out before the reporter. That would be a very important metric, if only there was a way to get it.

At this point one thing that I can say is the better you know your local news sources and what they like, the easier it will be to get press, if press is what you want.

News worthiness

So what qualifies as news? That might be like answering a three year old’s questions about Santa Clause. Whatever you tell him, he’s going to compare it to what he’s heard from other kids, adults and advertisers. No matter what you say, it’s going to be wrong in some cases and different in others. So why am I even considering this as I’m talking about PRWeb?

The news worthiness of whatever you want the press to cover plays a big part in whether or not anyone will want to publish it. Keep in mind that it’s news worthiness from the perspective of the journalist that might cover it. That might not line up with your view of what’s news worthy. So all of my considerations about newspapers, TV and PRWeb might not accurately represent average results if I didn’t really have a news worthy story. I obviously thought that I had a news worthy story with my Fitness Jumpstart program (on Maintain Fit).

SEO gains, PR losses

My timing blunder with PRWeb seems the most likely culprit for it’s failure. Here’s what happened. I had been looking at doing some press, but wasn’t sure about whether or not I should spend the $80 to $360 for PRWeb to publish it. What I did instead was publish a few of my releases using two mechanisms. First was www.prlog.com and the other was to use scribd and embed them on my exercise log blog.

The results from my approach were effective from an SEO perspective. With the three press releases that I put out this way I garnered some good search engine placement for terms related to my program. I also sent these press releases (as I already mentioned) to local newspapers and television stations. What I didn’t do was pay PRWeb to handle my press release during that crucial week between Christmas and New Year’s. Being the cheapskate that I am I chose the approach I mentioned above.

As soon as the first article was published and didn’t produce any perceivable traffic (remember that bit about newspapers being dead?), I started to think about other ways to get traffic for the program. That’s when I went back to PRWeb. I searched the internet and found many people speak highly of PRWeb and read about the mountains of traffic they got. While I knew that most journalists had already written their New Year’s resolution articles, I thought maybe there was a place for a late comer (aren’t there folks that procrastinate their New Year’s resolutions?). And leaning on the good things I had heard about PRWeb I decided to pay $80 and see what happened.

PRWeb results

At that price point they didn’t post my press release until two days had passed, which was on January 8th. I think you can guess what happened. Not much. True to their word, PRWeb got some attention, including a search for “mr usa” included some news results for the day of the release. Yahoo! News republished the story here. I can’t really tell how much SEO effect it might have had and I know it might have been more if I paid another $120 for the SEO package.

Google Analytics PRWeb

Woopra Analytics PRWeb

What were the actual traffic numbers? Google Analytics says that I got 12 visits from PRWeb and Woopra shows almost double that at 23 visits. That’s in contrast to the stats PRWeb shows with 65631 impressions, 708 reads and over 200 interactions. I’m not sure what interactions are, but those numbers seem to suggest that I had a 1% readthrough rate (did you like that word?) for the release on their site, and out of 200 interactions I got between 12 and 23 people to my site (with an 83.33% bounce rate). Even taking the higher number from Woopra, this would compare to a 0.035% clickthrough rate and an average cost per click of $3.48.

PRWeb analytics

Whoa! Did I just say that I paid $3.48 per visitor to my website? That can make Google adwords look REALLY CHEAP in comparison, but that may not be the full story. For example, if my story sucked, or my release was poorly timed (I do think the timing was bad), that might have something to do with it. Another thing that’s hard/impossible to gauge is the amount of SEO benefit (if any) that I might have gotten from the link on prweb.com. I did format my URL so that it would have the keywords I thought were a best fit, but they don’t turn out to be very high traffic keywords.

Press best practices for online marketers

Yahoo! News republication of PRWeb press release

So the elements that I’ve discussed in this post include timing, content (or story) and some of the particulars of direct traffic vs. SEO benefit from press release submissions. I’ve also mentioned some of the differences between what newspapers and television stations are looking for. Depending on the news source, you might benefit from a little more lead time. You’ll also want to think about whether or not what you have makes a good visual or a better written article.

As a direct traffic source, PRWeb doesn’t seem to live up to it’s cost of $80. However, with the right, well timed story, it might produce traffic through other means (e.g. someone publishes and article or feature on it). And for the record, the Yahoo! News republish of the press release brought ZERO visitors. I’m not sure how their news service works, but getting published in Yahoo! News didn’t produce any direct traffic results. It may turn out that it does have some SEO benefit, but I have yet to prove that since they use a redirect mechanism rather than just linking to my site.

If you have experience with press releases, take a minute and post your comments below.