Forum Moderators: martinibuster
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.
My Account > Account Settings > Interest based ads
you can disable it here :-)
On the "My Account" tab in Adsense, toward the bottom, there is a section called Interest-based Ads Preference which allows you to opt out. Opting out also means that data collected from your site will not be used in determining interest categories.I just opted out. Didn't like the fact it was already enabled.
New options shouldn't be configured as enabled as default right?
ASA
Thankfully we can opt out!
Now -- for those who opt out -- we shouldn't have to make the changes to our privacy policy, right?
I don't want to be bothered with the extra work since I've opted out.
no interest on this concept
So I doubt if the effect you are seeing is due to interest-based advertising.
Oh really? I just checked and the option is available under the My Account tab. And, yes, it was turned on.
Even if you choose to opt out of displaying ads based on interest categories, your site(s) will continue to show ads based on user interactions with an advertiser
So, what is the purpose of opting out?
(bolding by me)
And also I opt out the internet based ads in my account.
See, this is why I really wish we could opt out/in by adblock or by channel. I am starting the high season on my biggest site. I CAN'T afford a account wide test of this right now. If they gave me the option to start small, I could do some testing, find where it works. Maybe put interest ads in the side bar and content focused ads in the copy. Play around with it to make it work.
But since it is all or nothing, I have to turn it off. Testing is not an option right now. maybe in the low season I will turn it back on, if I remember.
On a more serious note I will repeat a question I put in the Privacy Statement thread. It isn't clear to me what happens if you opt out as a publisher. Are visits to your site not tracked or does it just mean that you don't get any "benefit" from the tracking?
It has got me pegged! ;-)
Interestingly, my earnings this morning have been about twice normal... even though my CTR is in the dumps. I'll leave it for a few days to see how it goes.
Ads are, at least in my opinion, a part of the user experience. I want them to be relevant to my site, in a way that they actually supplement whatever content I have on my site.
That makes sense if you've got a niche site in a category that attracts decent-paying targeted ads. But not all sites fall under that heading. Newspaper sites, for example, typically earn abysmal CPMs (and, presumably, AdSense eCPMs) because readers aren't in "shopping research mode" when they're reading about the war in Afghanistan or the latest bad news from Wall Street.
I'd guess that if you've got, say, a site about industrial widgets or luxury cruising, you'll continue to see ads for those topics. But if you've got a site that doesn't attract high-paying contextual ads, ads that are targeted to the readers' known interests will perform better (and will be more useful to readers) than the kinds of ads that Google has been displaying on your pages.
Particularly since it apparently requires us to update our privacy policy, I feel they (Google) are putting me at risk by setting this to "on" by default and then emailing me to update my privacy policy.
I need to do more research before I just "update" my privacy policy and notify my 100,000 registered users that we are now watching their every move.
Obviously the smart thing for G to do would be to turn this feature on, test it for a couple of days, and if it's clearly damaging earnings then turn it off. I wonder if that's what happened.
(As I said before, Google is actually *late* coming to this particular party. Everyone else has been there for months or years.)
ASA,
Is this the reason why adsense is behaving so wildly this month (aside from the bug you already mentioned, of course)?
I have today lowest of this month CTR and eCPM
Is the experiement running now?
This feature has had no effect on the performance of the ads on your site. The beta for Interest Based Advertising will begin on April 8, and that's why we've asked publishers to update their privacy policies by that date.
Will there be away to turn this off?
You can opt out of interest category marketing (showing ads based on a user's categories of interest), but I personally don't think you should. None of you have had the opportunity to try it yet. Lately it feels like half the conversations on this forum are about revenue. Interest-based advertising should increase your earnings as more advertisers use it in their campaigns.
Because interest-based ads will compete in the auction, your site will only show those ads if they pay more than what you'd otherwise get with contextually targeted or placement-targeted ads. In other words, all the ads (interest-based, contextually targeted, placement targeted) will compete in the auction, and the ad with the highest eCPM will show on your site.
But yes, you can opt out of ads targeted using interest categories. freejung and a bunch of others made the point already, but I’ll reiterate because it’s important to note that you can opt out. Go into your account, click on the “My Account” tab, and scroll down to “Interest-based Ads” to set your preferences. Please note that while you can opt out of showing ads based on interest categories, but not based on a user's previous interactions with an advertiser's site. There's more information in the Help Center article here [google.com].
what's the point of us building a page reviewing an item, promoting its sale, to better plug the ad, if they're just going to bung another ad on there about a completely different product.
Regardless of how the ad is targeted, it will have to win the auction. Just as contextually targeted and placement-targeted ads compete against each other, ads targeted through interest-based advertising will compete in the auction. The ad with the highest predicted eCPM will show.
However, the average user definitely notices popups and is annoyed by them. If G does this right, the average user will never even be aware that it is happening.
The actual goal is to provide a better experience for users of your site by serving them the ads they're most likely to benefit from. (And definitely not pop-up ads. We never serve pop-up ads.) The Ads Preferences Center [google.com] that users can reach by clicking on the "Ads by Google" link on an ad allows users to select the types of ads they’d like to receive (which means a higher likelihood of interaction with the ad and hopefully a higher eCPM for you). Using their history and their stated preferences, we can serve users ads for things they actually want. (If you want more information on the controls open to users, check out the post on the Google Public Policy Blog.)
I think many people use the web like that. I don't want camera ads because now I'm looking at printer toner sources. I wanted camera stuf five minutes ago.
FWIW, this morning I visited Amazon and they reminded me of something I searched for a couple of weeks ago. I had forgotten about it but made a purchase this morning.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my buying habits are more like FarmBoy’s. If I’m in the market for a camera, I look around and read reviews for a long time before I buy one. :)
Seriously, though, I urge you to read up on this and educate yourself on what we're doing. To be perfectly frank, I had a lot of questions at first for a lot of the reasons that you guys mention. I've been in a lot of meetings and I've had a lot of conversations about it, and I'm satisfied with what I've learned about what we're doing and how we're doing it. I truly believe that this is the right thing to do for you guys, for advertisers, and for users. And I like the fact that we're empowering publishers and users to make the decisions that are right for them. I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it.
ASA
