EBay has begun sharing the browsing habits of its users with third party advertisers, as the online marketplace looks to rival Amazon, Facebook on Google in the lucrative practice of behaviourally targeted ads.
The company’s program will work in a manner similar to Amazon’s retargeting program.
For example eBay users searching for cameras will now see ads displayedon the site that are related to photography, such as camera retailer websites or photography courses.
Instead of merely selling all of the data to marketing companies, eBay will instead choose to sell targeted advertisements to companies who are interested in reaching a specific audience.
In a bid to calm privacy fears, eBay says that marketers will not have full control of a users data, but eBay itself will sell targeted advertisements to those companies.
In an interview, Stephen Howard-Sarin, eBay’s head of digital display in North America, said: “We’re now commercialising that capability for the benefit of other marketers who want to reach shoppers. If you’re an agency and it complicates your life because we’ve got a unique pool of data that you don’t have, tough. It would be shortsighted of us to give that data.”
