There is a natural trade-off that each of us makes everyday between convenience and privacy. You can drive through the toll booth and sit in line with everyone else waiting to deposit your anonymous quarters or you can drive through the SpeedPass lane at 80 MPH and have your wireless toll tag charge your credit card. For pragmatists, this decision is easy. But consider for a moment all of the information that has been generated about you and with whom that information may be shared.

Who (or more precisely which vehicle) was driving on which highway at what toll booth traveling in a given direction at an exact point in time. If the trip passes through multiple toll booths then a driver’s route, progress, and even his/her speed can be calculated. Applying analytical processes to all of the historical data for an individual allows us to generate a profile of the driver. For example, based on the time of day that the driver passes through certain tolls, educated guesses can be made about the location of his/her work. And remember, this data can be combined with the existing demographic data already on file to improve the accuracy of these guesses. For example, the driver’s home address is already on file for billing purposes. Using this home address services like Zillow.com can determine the cost of the home and therefore the driver’s likely household income. If that the driver goes through the airport toll road towards the airport on average twice a week and returns the next day and you might begin to suspect that this person works in sales or is an executive and travels extensively for short overnight trips to visit clients. With every data point collected this profile becomes more and more accurate; correcting false assumptions over time.

Of course, this kind of profiling can be used for many purposes, some mutually beneficial, some downright creepy. For example, the toll plaza could flash traffic warnings to you when you pass through based on your historical driving route. City planners could use the data to justify the installation of so-called “Lexus Lanes” based on segmentation of the income level of drivers on a particular highway. Or an unscrupulous individual could use this information to target homes for burglary when it appears the owner is out of town (remember the airport toll road). The possibilities are endless.

Online marketers are using a similar approach to profile their prospects in order to better measure level of interest and to segment and qualify prospects before handing them over to their sales department. Marketers who leverage this technology effectively can provide a more targeted and relevant evaluation and purchasing experience to prospects who truly show interest in their offerings and avoid annoying those who are “just browsing”.

Let’s review the kinds of information that marketers can collect online to build this profile:

Behavioral
The moment a visitor lands on my website, his/her browser is “tagged” with a unique ID that allows me to recognize him/her upon return visits to my site (or even across multiple websites depending on the situation). Now every click the visitor ever makes on my website(s) can be associated with his/her anonmyous profile.