How Good Are Web Ads at tracking effectiveness?

Factual Questions
1

I was putzing around and enjoying Zero Punctuation this afternoon while the SDMB was all wonky and the question occurred to me. I’m not much of a gamer but I spend a lot of time online and own a Xbox360 so I will occasionally take note of what’s new and hot in the gaming world and as a result I clicked on the EVE Online banner that was all pretty and flashy. I’d heard of EVE before but had no real idea what it was or what it was about. I didn’t buy anything, but it made me wonder how beneficial that little process was for The Escapist website.

So, to boil the question down, here’s the steps:

  1. I watched the ZP video.

  2. Decided to click the EVE Empyerian Age banner and was taken to the Trailer website.

  3. I watched the trailer.

  4. I clicked the “Main Website” link on that page to learn more about the premise of the game.

  5. I left the website.

So that’s it. EVE Online didn’t get any money from me, but because of ZP I visited their site and learned all about the game. Does that do anything for The Escapist?

At some point in the future if I’m bored I might (at least theoretically) return to the EVE Online site and download the free trial. If I like the game a lot I might purchase it and sign up for a subscription to the MMORPG service. Most likely I’d navigate there via Google or by just typing eve-online.com into FF.

So if I…

  1. Googled EVE Online 4 months from now and returned to their website.

  2. Downloaded the free trial.

  3. Liked it and subscribed/bought the game.

How would The Escapist get paid there? Has Online Advertising advanced to the point where the websites get paid a flat fee? Or do they get paid for impressions? Do they get paid more for click-thrus? Do they get paid for conversions? If they do get paid for conversions do the cookies in my computer indicate that my first experience with EVE Online came via ZP even if I navigate there through Google at a later date?

I’m sure all those ideas vary based on individual contracts and certain products that aren’t readily available for purchase online, but generally speaking would ZP/Escapist get paid if I went back and bought the game in a month via Google? What if I just went back tonight but typed in the URL directly?

2

You’re being tracked by cookie now, not by clicking links. The same way that the SDMB still knows who you are when you close your browser, turn off your machine, go to Florida for a week and come back to the boards on your machine.

So if you click on an ad and go to a site, it’ll know who you are (as in “you are that person who came from this site”) in the future if you make a purchase.

The cookie could expire before you buy, or you could remove the cookie from your machine. If you’ve ever run an anti-spyware program, those tend to wipe out ad-based cookies from your browser, but not login-based ones.

The business of user tracking is big business. There’s tons of ways to track people throughout the Internet.