The core advantage of digital marketing over more traditional OOH or print-based marketing efforts is based in its ability to accurately identify audiences with higher likelihood to be interested in, and ultimately buy, the product. There are many options for firms to explore as they start targeting potential customers, but here I'll discuss the value of cookies vs. IP address targeting.
Cookies, in internet-speak, are a way for websites to track your session on their site. By accepting cookies, the user consents to share their activity (what they clicked on), sometimes their account information and preferences. In return, the user can expect to experience a more streamlined website - their preferences can be saved, their process through a check-out can be replicated when they come back, and websites can effectively highlight certain products or services based on the cookie's data on preferences.
IP addresses, on the other hand, share much less information - it's mainly just the identifier of which local server the user's computer is accessing when they visit websites. However, though it includes less rich information than cookies (specifically on click history on individual web-pages), it does provide an important value-add over cookies: it's directly tying the individual to the behavior on your website. Cookies can be susceptible to bots, crawlers, and others acting on a central machine, and they are easily cleaned out whenever a user clears their browser history. IP targeting also offers an important degree of confidence when thinking of local marketing. Since there is such high confidence in the location of the user, IP targeting is exceptionally useful for driving local traffic, or selling products that have a specific geographic limit (like banking products, or local government races).
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