Enhanced Google AdSense Is All about User Behavior

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 12 Mar 2009

According to Google, ads are important from an informational point of view in that special tailored ads bring you only the info you need; info on products that you are interested in purchasing of course. It is thus very important for Google to ensure that you get only relevant ads when you browse the web, and the way to do this is by enhancing the connection between Google users and advertisers – by means of behavioral targeting, or as Google calls it, “interest-based” advertising.

“Advertising is the lifeblood of the digital economy: it helps support the content and services we all enjoy for free online today, including much of our news, search, email, video and social networks. We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. 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,” explained Vice President of Product Management, Susan Wojcicki.

It seems that the ones asking for enhanced marketing possibilities are Google’s partner publishers and advertisers; not that Google would mind at all, since advertising is an important source of revenue for the Mountain View search engine giant.

If you like the idea of “interest-based” advertising and would like to get relevant ads tailored to your interests, the Google has set up a web page where you can provide more details on what ads you would like to get. Alternatively, if this does not sound like a good idea to you, the web page also provides and opt out feature. You might want to opt out if you are interested in keeping your inline browsing habits private. The issue of online privacy has been acknowledged by Google and has been under the watchful eye of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

“The issues with behavioral advertising have been with us for over a decade, and have grown as more people use more services online and more information has become available about your online behavior. Google contacted us about behavioral targeting early on in their development process, and solicited our feedback. One issue we discussed was a persistent problem with opting-out of targeted online advertising. So we worked with Google to seek a new solution. Google accepted the technical challenge, and the result is the Advertising Cookie Opt-Out Plug-in, which allows users to keep their opt-out status for a particular browser even when they clear all cookies,” said EFF.


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