What Safari Top Sites does to retargeting

I have been thinking about why a specific company never let’s me go. They are retargeting me everywhere and all of the time. I don’t visit their site frequently, and they should really have set a maximum amount of times to target me, before I am considered to be simply not worth the ad spending.

But standing on my balcony this evening I figured it out. It must be because of Top Sites in my Safari browser: Every time you open the up Top Sites, these bookmarked sites get a pageview as well as visit and visitor if those criterias are met. So in the company´s view, I am repeatedly coming back, and as I haven´t bought anything yet I must be a really interesting prospect.

Imagine also what this is doing to driving statistics for websites: That’s a lot of traffic from people who never even knew they where on these sites. In my case, having 20 bookmarked Top Sites, I generate 20 pageviews on these sites every time I open up a new tab.