NSA knows to whom you send e-mails and from whom you receive them. They know the subject lines of those e-mails, the content (if the subject line seemed interesting enough to dig deeper), the sites you visit, the pages you view on those sites and the offers you click on. A government computer knows you're reading this right now. 

Sounds spooky 'til you realize Yahoo knew all that a long time ago. When it comes to tracking your online activity, NSA is playing catch up.

The big five internet search/portal/social network companies – Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace – record 336 billion data transmissions a month, according to a ComScore study quoted in The New York Times. The most aggressive information gatherer (which is to say the snoopiest of the bunch) is Yahoo. They collect an average of 811 snippets of information about each visitor to their site every month.

That's right. If you've been on Yahoo or one of their partner sites this month, they know 811 things about you. Plus another 811 from last month, and 811 more from every month you visited before that.

Why this intense interest in every single one of us? It's not just voyeurism or national security. It's marketing. 

Web-based advertising has evolved from the original cost-per-view and subsequent cost-per-click models to cost-per-action. Search is moving toward more effective organic search and integrated paid and organic campaigns. And everything marketers do online is being evaluated on a response-rate basis. The important – and growing – emphasis on effectiveness has made targeting critical.

Targeting on the web can achieve precision no previous medium could deliver. And it's constantly getting more accurate.

In the early days of internet advertising, web companies could only track visitors to their own sites. As the search engines and portals bought (or became)  online advertising delivery companies, they got tracking access to the sites on which they sell ads. Access to social sites added more data to the mix.

With the major players' data banks and networks, it's now possible to reach single females, age 25-39, living in specific ZIP codes who own cats which have digestive problems. And you can reach them with either display ads or sponsored search. Extremely valuable targeting for a veterinarian. 

This isn't just demographic data that delivers "people of an age, gender and household income with a higher index of cat ownership." Or even lifestyle data that helps reach "people with lifestyle factors indicative greater likelihood of cat ownership."  It's even more than a cat publication list delivering "highly probable cat owners."  It's "cat owners who are looking for a veterinarian now."

This near-perfect specificity is why the costs of search and online ads are going up dramatically. The medium is more valuable when it delivers a near-perfectly tailored audience, and the portals and search engines have never been shy about maximizing their rates. (Actually, advertisers are probably getting as many real prospects for each dollar as they did in the past, but they're not reaching all those other people who fit the demographic or lifestyle parameters of likely prospects but aren't in the market for the product or service.)

Of course the online heavy hitters can't always deliver an audience precisely tailored to your target. In some cases the target isn't easily identifiable through tracked web activity.

Heavy beer drinkers stand out as a difficult-to-reach group. Blue-collar, 40+, males in first level supervisory jobs could be reached. But not all of them are reparative personality types. And even if – or when – reparative personality types can be targeted, only a fraction of them are heavy beer drinkers. And heavy beer drinkers tendency to lump a group of acceptable brands together as parity products, means they're not visiting brewery web sites. (On twelve brews a day, they may not be in any condition to visit anything but the john.) Even the dilatants aren't going to bond with Bud.com.

In those cases marketers are thrown back onto the approximations of demographics and psychographics. Still doable online, but with no more precision than the Nielsen and PRISM numbers available for traditional media.

But when precision targeting is available – car buyers, cancer patients, homeowners who need a plumber, couples planning a Caribbean vacation and that cat owner looking for a vet – the ability to reach the exactly right audience (and virtually no one else) at predetermined points in the decision cycle is an incalculable – no, make that a precisely calculable – advantage.

What do the prospective customers think about being scrutinized so closely?

Mostly, they don't think about it.

Although privacy watchdogs have barked loud and long about internet data collection, the general public doesn't seem to notice that it's being done.  A 2007 University of California at Berkeley study found that 85% of adults thought web sites should not be allowed to track visitors' web usage in order to target the visitors for ads. But it happens billions of times every day with virtually no consumer complaints.

At least there are few complaints when the tracking is invisible.

Facebook recently had a self-inflicted maelstrom of complaint when it rolled out its Beacon feature, which automatically broadcasts users' online purchases to the friends in their network. The announcement of the new "service" was met with the howls of tens of thousands of outraged Facebook users.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, offered a fast online apology, and has made a circuit of digerati events to deliver heartfelt mea culpas. And, of course, Facebook immediately gave users an opt-out choice on the site.

Interestingly, not many took advantage of the opt-out.

Facebook's young user base may be the reason for the low opt-out rate. After all, teens and twenties are on Facebook to share – actually broadcast – information about themselves. And there's also the tendency to not mess with default settings. "Most people don't change the default. If the default is 'on,' they'll never turn it off." says Stanford lecturer David McClure. "The [user group's] default [setting] is that their lifestyle is transparent."

So those tens of thousands vociferous complainers weren't representative of the tens of millions of Facebook users who now are aware – and apparently unconcerned – that data about their online purchases are being collected and disseminated.

Of course the data Facebook is collecting is a very small drop in a very large bucket.

There's so much data being gathered that sifting through it is a massive undertaking. More than a billion pieces of data collected daily by the big five. And billions more by everyone else in the business. Complex correlations to triangulate in on prospects when direct data isn't available. Algorithms to project where prospects are in the decision cycle.

Ultimately, data analysis – making sense of and taking advantage of all the information that's available – is likely be more important than data accumulation. For now, at least, it seems that the big five are far ahead in both halves of the equation.

So far the traditional media companies are woefully lagging at collecting data, and as a result, don't have complex (or rich) enough data bases to have acquired or developed leading edge data analysis techniques. (An example of the data acquisition disparity: Yahoo has 2,529 data collection points on its search and ad networks while The New York Times has just 45. As reported in the self-same New York Times!)

If you're marketing a product or service which involves: a relatively high level of user/decision maker involvement; great importance to the target audience; a major expenditure; unfamiliarity to the purchasers; a relatively young target audience; or a combination of those characteristics, the increasing precision of web targeting can make your marketing a lot more effective.

A disclaimer: BrainPosse isn't tracking you. It's not that we don't care. We're just respecting your privacy. We collect data on our site's monthly unique visitors, total monthly visits, and total page views, but we don't capture individual web addresses. The only way to get on our e-mail reminder list is to opt-in. (To do that, click here or call BrainPosse at (865) 330-0033.

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