Internet marketing has become increasingly more personalized to the user over the past couple of years, but has it become too personal? A new approach known as personalized retargeting or remarketing has become the new favored method used by online marketers to send advertisements to users via the Internet.

Personalized retargeting tailors ads so that users are viewing ads of products and services they are most likely to purchase. It knows this by tracking what you have viewed and clicked on within an online business site. For example the article “Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites” illustrates an example of this where a Montreal women looked at a pair of shoes on Zappos.com, but she wasn’t ready to buy them just yet so she left the site and continued browsing on the Internet. As she viewed other sites she noticed an ad for Zappos kept popping up that showed the same exact pair shoes she had just looked at on the site. This ad continued to pop up for days and weeks after she had originally visited the site. Even though this is a great marketing strategy marketers can use, I do not beleive it is in their best interest because of the way it makes consumers feel; a feeling of being watched over.

With retargeting becoming so precise with what ads to deliver to what uers many consumers are feeling like they are being watched as they browse the Internet. In reality they are being watched, and I do feel like it is an invasion of our consumer privacy. If a online business is able to target what you buy that easily then they can formulate a pretty good perception of what you look like and what social class you may be a part of. They don’t have too look at you to figure this out because they can just look at what you buy. I believe the government needs to step in and regulate this in some way.

Today my MKTG 470 class was honored to have Ms. Deb Van Horn; the VP of Support Services at The Rockingham Group, give her own personal insight and knowledge on the ever expanding world of internet marketing.

In her presentation Ms. Van Horn illustrated the benefits her firm receives from being able to connect with consumers through social media, in particular Facebook. Facebook is an effective tool for reaching consumers since it enables two-way communication, which is something many marketers are having a difficult time adjusting too. In the past they just sent out ads and never had to deal with the instant feedback that social media now provides consumers with. Ms. Van Horn then showed how her company has been able to effectively target the right consumer segment by monitoring their Facebook activity. By doing so they were able to focus the majority of their online advertising on consumers who lived in Virginia and who were 45 years or older.

She then went on to describe how advertising online is much more inexpensive, not to mention more effective then advertising on the television or in the newspaper. When advertising online you don’t pay per impression you pay per click, whereas when advertising through the television or newspaper you do have to pay for each impression. In Harrisonburg the going rate for each impression of a television ad is ten dollars and for a newspaper it is between three and six dollars. If you were in a major city it would at least be triple the cost.

I learned many lessons from Ms Van Horn, the main thing was that she wanted to communicate to us that internet marketing is constantly evolving and if you are able to stay up to date with it you will always have a competitive advantage over the competition. She wanted to make sure that we know the importance of establishing a strong Linkedin page. Also she wanted us to Google ourselves to see what pops up and to see if that is what we want to be viewed as because that is what an employer would see. She was very insightful and would recommend her as a person to go to learn more. You can contact her through email at dlvanhorn@rockinghamgroup.com or through Twitter at http://twitter.com/debvanhorn.

On March 1, 2012 Google will update their private policy in order “to enable the combination of user data from one Google service with user data from other Google services.”

The main point as to why Google is issuing this new private policy is because it allows for Google to gain user permission to share valuable user-internet data across all Google products. With the new policy Google is positioning itself as a one-stop shop for targeted advertising. This will also allow Google to better tailor their paid seacrh ads, display ads, and orgainic listenings. Google can now create more unique, relevant search engine pages for each specific user.

Google’s new private policy creates more opportunites in brand advertising, but more importantly it better positions Google against competing firms like Facebook when it comes to cnnected user demographic and interest data.