BA's passenger segmentation
Jun 17, 2017, 11:52 am
#91
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: London, United Kingdom
Programs: BA Lifetime Gold;BA GGL; hhonors lifetime diamond; Marriott lt Gold; IH Plat Amb; Amex Centurion
Posts: 4,739
No need to sue, it is present in the code.
Jun 17, 2017, 11:55 am
#92
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: London, United Kingdom
Programs: BA Lifetime Gold;BA GGL; hhonors lifetime diamond; Marriott lt Gold; IH Plat Amb; Amex Centurion
Posts: 4,739
Guilty as charged, though in mitigation:-
- I am an ICT lawyer so comparatively human
- I was making a feeble attempt at film references
- as to Latin I am very sorry but I can't help it. I am more to be pitied than condemned...
- I am an ICT lawyer so comparatively human
- I was making a feeble attempt at film references
- as to Latin I am very sorry but I can't help it. I am more to be pitied than condemned...
Jun 26, 2017, 2:25 pm
#93
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 115
Well I'm late to the party but looking at the code this data is being sent to two places: DoubleClick (ad server) and Google Analytics (web analytics).
The first one is pretty simple. It looks like the intention is that, when you click an ad on BA.com, it suffixes some of that data to the URL. The advertiser will be able to read those parameters and track (for example) how many first-class passengers have clicked on their ad. Or maybe they want to show London-based flyers a different page.
On the web analytics side, they're marrying up two sets of data: your customer behaviour (as in the stuff that's the subject of this thread) and your user behaviour (tracked with a Google Analytics session ID). It's really easy to track basic metrics like average time on site and what device most users use, but by capturing those variables about your customer behaviour alongside your session ID, Google Analytics can segment those metrics quite nicely.
For example, are people who 'prefer' to fly economy actually searching for business class flights and moving on once they see the price? What's the first thing that SCHs click on after they visit the 'gold benefits' page? Maybe BA have spotted a barely used page and don't want to bother maintaining and updating it anymore, but if they can see that most of the people who use it are GCHs then they might think again. Etc, etc.
So, all this information is client-side because Google's reading it. I suppose they could obscure it by making the field names less intelligible, but seeing as this data is stuff about you that you presumably already know, I doubt they care.
The first one is pretty simple. It looks like the intention is that, when you click an ad on BA.com, it suffixes some of that data to the URL. The advertiser will be able to read those parameters and track (for example) how many first-class passengers have clicked on their ad. Or maybe they want to show London-based flyers a different page.
On the web analytics side, they're marrying up two sets of data: your customer behaviour (as in the stuff that's the subject of this thread) and your user behaviour (tracked with a Google Analytics session ID). It's really easy to track basic metrics like average time on site and what device most users use, but by capturing those variables about your customer behaviour alongside your session ID, Google Analytics can segment those metrics quite nicely.
For example, are people who 'prefer' to fly economy actually searching for business class flights and moving on once they see the price? What's the first thing that SCHs click on after they visit the 'gold benefits' page? Maybe BA have spotted a barely used page and don't want to bother maintaining and updating it anymore, but if they can see that most of the people who use it are GCHs then they might think again. Etc, etc.
So, all this information is client-side because Google's reading it. I suppose they could obscure it by making the field names less intelligible, but seeing as this data is stuff about you that you presumably already know, I doubt they care.
