I know cookies are a thing, but how do they know I’ve been on other sites? My reason for asking is that the last time I visited Groupon I received a coupon in my email for $5 off. Today I visited 1800flowers and got a PayPal coupon from them. I don’t have a PayPal app or anything, so how do they know I’ve been on groupon?
In: 0
PayPal knows about your activity because the other sites you go to sell your traffic data in exchange for dollars. There are two possibilities – either 1-800-Flowers or Groupon have have a partnership directly with PayPal, or they sell their customer data. There are large exchanges where customer data is bought and sold to make advertising more effective.
In the first instance, Groupon might have a deal with PayPal where they send a web request to PayPal’s API whenever certain criteria are met. For example, they might see the PayPal cookie and then send a request to PayPal saying “Hey user 12345 in your system just logged onto our site and made this purchase.”
In the second instance, Groupon would sell a data set that says “This user made a purchase in our system, do with that knowledge what you will.” And then PayPal, and possibly others, would buy that data and consume it to make their own advertising decisions.
Source: I’m a software engineer that works in the advertising technology industry, although my company does not buy or sell any user data.
Latest Answers