Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Banner Add rotation.

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

The better systems will track you in several ways including IP and 
cookies and will adjust the ad content you see based on your history of 
interests and buying habits. A huge amount of time and money by Amazon, 
Google, etc has gone into perfecting that kind of tracking. On the other 
hand a good majority of banner systems were put together by people who 
don't care or don't know how to do it right so you end up with random 
ads, a simple cycle, or even just static ads. For example, a smart 
system would track which ads it's shown you recently and follow it up a 
few minutes later with another ad for the same product in order to 
create frequency. Ask anyone that works in television or radio 
advertising and you'll hear them use this term a lot and they have 
plenty of numbers to show that it works. The majority of ad  banner 
systems ignore frequency or go at it in a brute force method, simply 
showing the same ad repeatedly, which is also rather ineffective. If 
your sites used frequency then as you used the site you should quickly 
see a similar ad to the one you were trying to get back to.
> I've noticed a bizarre situation with banner adds.   Like you I never 
> really pay attention to them anyways, but twice in as many days, I 
> have been on a site and seen one out of the corner of my eye just 
> after I clicked a button to go to another part of the site.  When I 
> click back, I find out that it's a rotating system as it loads a new 
> add into the space.   Now here's the thing.  One would assume that 
> these are random, or perhaps a bit weighted to those who pay more, but 
> eventually you should be able to come up with the add you're looking 
> for assuming a finite selection of adds.  Yes I realize that even with 
> a pseudo random, that this could take a long time, but still it would 
> not account for the behavior I've seen on Snopes.com and 
> Dictionary.com such that if I hit reload a couple of times, eventually 
> I'll land on a Shutterfly and Classmates.com advertisement 
> respectively and then no matter how many times I continue to reload, 
> I'll never get a different add.
>
> Do these things have some sort of cookie component?   I wonder if 
> their algorithms are just so screwed up that after X iterrations it 
> fails to deliver new content.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
> I never have gotten back to the adds I was looking for.  I never 
> thought I'd say that and actually care.

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