MatchLogic Launches Intelligent Targeting Service

Excite’s MatchLogic Inc. in Colorado launched TrueSelect, a new service that it said “redefines intelligent targeting in the digital marketing space,” by providing advanced one-to-one anonymous customer targeting capabilities.

TrueSelect directs banner ad or daughter window content to specific users, so a company can focus an online ad campaign to precisely the audience it desires, the company said.

Four types of information are collected to learn about users–location, demographics, search engine keywords, and browsing preferences.

“Intelligent targeting does not exist without measurement. It’s more than using the latest, hot software. You’ve got to have better data in the software to begin with,” said Steve Willett, MatchLogic’s director of advanced targeting. “With TrueSelect, we collect and process extensive information describing Internet users so our advertisers know who’s out there and what kind of ads they want to see. Then, we provide precisely the right message to the right audience at the right time7”

TrueSelect supports four types of anonymous targeting:

• Geographic – Information about an individual user’s location, based on their ISP address.
• Demographic – Information such as gender, age, income, presence of children, marital status, and education, obtained from user registrations or opt-in mailing lists.
• Keywords – Keywords entered into a search engine are recorded and processed to determine what a user’s interests are.
• Intender (behavioral) Targeting – MatchLogic works with its clients to model and build specific profiles of online behavior. When users carry out any of several pre-defined activities on client sites, such as clicking certain icons or visiting certain pages, the behavior is flagged and used to determine what the user’s interests are.

Anonymous behavioral information is processed offline by a variety of advanced modeling technologies, and used to form a comprehensive database of user profiles, each assigned an anonymous code number, the company said. When this “anonymous profile” is used in conjunction with advertiser data, MatchLogic can determine precisely which users would be interested in any particular advertisement.

When users visit any of MatchLogic’s network of nearly 1,000 client sites, they see advertisements from these clients only if the user meets pre- specified criteria.

TrueSelect also can be used in conjunction with MatchLogic’s TruEffect tracking service, which reports sales and conversion rates beyond the click- through, thus offering a true ROI measurement package, the firm said.