Just had this idea. What do you guys think?

M

mpbiz

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Apr 29, 2010
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Ok so I've been looking for something to make now that I have some programming skills and I just got this idea.

Basically, my service would allow you to generate as many pixels as you like. One for your entire site, one for individual pages, email lists, etc.

My service would then track where your visitors go after they leave your site and you'd be able to see in real time (think the tracking202 spy view) what sites your visitors are going to. And I don't mean just the first site they exit to. I mean you'd be able to monitor all of their activity for the next year if you wanted.

Would also analyze the data as it gathers and look for trends.

The idea is that you'd be able to get a better idea of where your visitors are going and not only gain insights but then take specific action like place a media buy with a specific site that they are visiting. Note that this tool would only deal with the data, not actual advertising or anything like that.

Could even set this up to be self hosted.

What do you guys think?
 


It would have real uses, but at the same time we all know how much webmasters love those vanity metrics and a live spy view like this is pretty cool.
 
PS. Once I got the ball rolling we could set it up so that you'd be able to match your visitors to facebook data and get extremely accurate demographic data for YOUR landers, offers, and sites.

A lot more accurate than the BS that compete and quantcast display.
 
Chango lets you do intent based retargeting and adjust your retargeting based on off site activities like googling for nonbrand terms or competitors brand names.

So they are aggregating data across cookies and properties.

Just saying.
 
ohhh man, I like this thread. It has taken me out of complete lurker mode and also used up my 1000th post. I really like your idea and I will take you further down the rabbit hole with it. I work for a ad tech company that is amazing at using intense data science driven programmatic buying to run big brand digital ad campaigns and what you are talking about is one of the starting points of what we do.

We are basically looking at huge percentage of browsers as they move across the internet at all times and when we sign on a client we place pixels around their web site to see how people interact with the different pages. Homepage visitors get placed into a bucket, other page visitors into another bucket and browsers who take whatever the different conversion actions may be get placed into other buckets. We then use a system which maps out the browsing page trail that the browser took to get to the website and take whatever action they took. Those paths get thrown into a bunch of different algorithms to find different versions of best paths to get to the site in a mood to convert based on thousands of recorded visits and conversions. Each of these different algorithms will have a ranked targetable bucket system built where each level of every algorithm has a different threshold level of alignment to the decided best browsing path. Each person in the rank buckets can move up or down in rank as their browsing habits change throughout any given day and each bucket will get different bids/caps/frequencies based on how they perform against each other and a control ron group.

Our side that analyzes everyone as they move across the internet gets the info from the audience requirement data that was built out in the previous paragraph and starts putting everyone into these different buckets for every brand we work with in a real time updated system of audiences to bid on as they move across sites and ad exchange placements.

We also take these audiences and match the desktop cookies to mobile devices that share ip's with the desktop so we can serve the same audiences across all devices.

We are also starting to do this whole process with people that visit physical locations for brands so they can get served desktop and mobile ads based off physical location visits that then does the whole same prospect audience building system that I was talking about earlier.

very soon you will jump into a cab and the tv will play a commercial for the store you were just in while seeing a 320x50 for it as you play fruity ninja puff crushers on your cell then get home and see a ad for it before you get to watch that one cat do that funny thing on youtube and then see a 30 second commercial as soon as you turn on cable tv or streaming tv.
Welcome to minority report suckassssss

Pixels + tracking a huge % of browsers and devices and places at all times + crazy voodoo data science = shooting fish in barrels.

I love talking about this stuff feel free to pm if you ever want to talk about such things
 
Paper_Chase said:
How do you track them after they leave your eco-system? Wouldn't it require ALL sites to have your pixels placed and agree to sell you that info?
Click to expand...

This. Unless they are installing something on their browsers or you have a presence on most other sites, like facebook does with their buttons, or google with adsense, analytics, etc, I don't see how this would be possible once they have left your site.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I just don't see how coming from someone who's been coding daily for over a decade with creative projects like these. But I'd happily welcome being proved wrong.
 
I want to access a bigger player's data pool. This would allow us to track all of this. Definitely a big picture idea that might be very hard to accomplish.

I'm just obsessed with all the data out there. Have some other dark side ideas for this too but data partners probably wouldn't allow it anyways.
 
Looks like there are workarounds but they either don't work anymore or are limited because you have to supply predefined domains to look for.
 
sweet idea. you should call this behavioral targeting, and then name your company blueLithium and sell to yahoo for 300 million.

oh wait...

Yahoo! Acquires Ad Network BlueLithium | TechCrunch

But in all seriousness OP keep writing these ideas in a diary even if you learn later they're not viable. You're at the stage where you know the possibilities of programming without the limitations. Overtime once you learn of the limitations, your thinking gets skewed and you'll start shooting down your own ideas. Kinda happened to me and now any idea I come up with I can think of a dozen ways for it to not work before coming up with ways it could.
 
Thanks for posting the obvious question..

after the first comments I was like "Am I too dumb, how does he.. how do you even..?"

Until someone finally asked how anyone would track outside the ecosystem, and it all crumbled, just the way I imagined it would.

MWAHAHAHAHA!

On the other hand:
Yes, write these ideas down. A lot of thought amalgamates over time.

::emp::
 
Couldnt you just create a fan page and track the other fan pages your fans like? That would tell you the sites and types of sites they visit most often.
 
Not only is the challenge of tracking across disconnected sites going to be difficult, but most Webmasters won't be able to do much with millions of site path data points.

It would be analysis paralysis.
 
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