• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 2, 2006

eBay's comparison shopping site, Shopping.com, will soon start displaying behaviorally targeted ads to visitors based on their search activity on the site and the pages they visit. Behavioral targeting company Revenue Science will power the initiative, which will start rolling out later this month.

Revenue Science will determine what types of merchandise visitors to Shopping.com appear interested in purchasing and then serve them ads for that type of product.

For instance, a user who searches on Shopping.com for laptops might then be shown ads for laptops even when he returns at a later time and goes to pages about travel books. "We're going to surround the user with ads based upon keyword search activity and content areas they've visited," said Jordan Grossman, account director at Shopping.com. "If we know that they shopped for digital cameras within the last several days we're going to surround them with banner ads." Revenue Science also will serve behaviorally targeted ads to visitors on Shopping.com's Epinions and Dealtime.

The deal is unusual because behavioral targeting companies have primarily worked with editorial publishers in the past, as opposed to e-commerce companies, where customers are presumably close to making a purchase.

Still, Shopping.com isn't the first e-commerce company to turn to behavioral targeting. Buy.com and LiveDeal, for instance, are clients of Revenue Science rival Tacoda.

Nick Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of account strategy at Revenue Science, says that he expects some more e-commerce companies to sign on soon. "As new categories are broken, they have broken in a big way," he said.