Mike On Ads

Greg Yardley wrote a nice post explaining how advertiser use pixels (also known as beacons) to track conversions. Nice read for those that don’t understand how conversion tracking happens.

I will disagree with Greg though that we haven’t had privacy online for a while — even though our actions are being tracked they are all on an anonymous basis. Facebook is the first that wants to tie this with a name. There’s a big difference between being able to say:

“A user with cookie ID #ace8748dff clicked on a Netflix ad at 10:45am on Nov 29th on mikeonads.com after having seen it four times and then signed up for a 30 day trial.”

and

“Mike Nolet bought Netflix today.”

I’m fine with the former, but the latter kind of freaks me out!