I have a website with a lot of recurring visitors and some new ones. While AdSense provides decent income I also have several one-off banners that I display on the website. What I consider going is using cookies to track visitors and keep track of which banner I've already shown to this particular user and did he ever click on it. This will allow to maximize number of different ads shown to every user and should be more effective rather that changing ads globally on the entire website. Therefor I have several questions: 1) Am I inventing a bicycle and in fact there is a ready PHP script that will do the same thing? I don't want to join any banner networks since most of the offers I advertise are not available on any of them. 2) Are there any privacy concerns associated with this idea? Should I put up a privacy policy or can I get by without one? 3) Has anyone tried something like this and did it work out?
Legally in the UK you must have a privacy policy if your site uses cookies for any reason anyway. It is arguable as to if it is best for you to show the same ad banner to someone because they have seen it before and responded positively to it or if it is best to show them something they havent seen before.
I have done something similar in the past, but you cant do it with something like adsense because they send out a "random" banner each time you request one so there is no way in knowing what banner they have already seen and which one to show them. Therefore the way that I did it was to sell the banner spaces on a site like this, so then i could control which one was going to come up and who was going to see it. I would say that you need a privacy policy, i put then on all of my sites even if they dont need one. Better to be safe than sorry... Tom
Are there any such laws in the US? Also, if based on the cookie I choose which banner to show to the user and if the user clicks he's taken to the other website can this be considered "sharing information with 3rd parties"? I would guess not, but just being paranoid