Google offers interest-based advertising

Google today is launching their interest-based advertising which works by delivering ads based on previously viewed sites, searches and activites on the web.

As an effort to make online advertising even more relevant, Google is opening this beta version to select advertisers on their partner sites and YouTube, however, it will soon be available to the entire user base.

Google’s official blog explains how “these ads will associate categories of interest-  say sports, gardening, cars, pets-  with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.”

In other words, Google will link ‘categories of interest’ based on the users web surfing habits. So if you’re one who searches for -U2’s upcoming concerts- Google will know that you’re interested in music and show you more music-related ads. Google currently has 30 top line categories and about 600 detailed categories.

Of course privacy issues have once again resurfaced the minute this ad solution was presented. The good thing about it though, is that users are free to opt-out and have complete control over which ads they want to see.

These options can all be set-up on the Google’s Ad Preference page. In addition, users can also add interest categories or remove categories from the preferences.

Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) offers more insight on the subject in particular Google’s opt-out option for interest-based ads.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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