• by Mark Kecko  @scoopseven, June 13, 2002

No more dropping a card with your name, address, and phone number into a cardboard box with a picture of some Caribbean island on it. Now, you can win prizes by submitting your personal data on a form at one of the many incentives websites. Then, wherever you go on the Internet and shop or click around you’ll be earning credit toward some cool prize. Well, actually, it’s not quite that easy. So how do they do it?

The mechanism by which websites usually remember or track a member is a cookie. The problem with cookies is that they can’t be shared or read between sites. Altavista can’t read my Yahoo cookie or vice-versa. So incentives sites had to come up with a way to track transactional data, a certain users action on any given site that in turn rewards that user with incentive points for their action.

MyPoints (www.mypoints.com) offers several different ways of earning points, all of which are direct links off the MyPoints website. So MyPoints.com could use cookies to track points earned by simply giving a link a value; by clicking on a given link, that link’s value is added to the users cookie, which represents points. Webstakes.com (www.webstakes.com) works in a similar fashion but gives out prizes such as televisions or gift certificates rather than awarding points.

One company, Netcentives.com (www.netcentives.com) has come up with its own Java-based software, RewardBroker, which creates custom based incentives programs and online promotions for any site. Using RewardBroker, a marketing manager could create two incentive programs on his own website to test how different marketing tactics might affect the performance of a product in the marketplace. Custom reporting is also available.

RewardBroker connects to the actual client data that resides on a website. Let’s say I’m a Yahoo member and I click on a banner to have a chance at winning my Caribbean island vacation. Yahoo knows who I am and has my contact information as well. This in turn enables RewardBroker to access that information (it can connect to a SQL, ORACLE or Sybase data structures) and send it to Netcentives for proper tabulation and reporting (and to see if I won). RewardBroker matches me with the action of clicking that particular banner by sending my email address and possibly another personal identifier, like a zip code, to Netcentives once I’ve clicked.

This allows Netcentives to track a certain persons incentive/promotion behavior across multiple websites that aren’t linked from the Netcentives website and are not necessarily its affiliates, something none of their competitors can boast. Who knows, maybe one day there won’t be a need to entice people to shop online by giving stuff away. Until then, find something cool and send me the URL where I have a chance to win it.