What is interested-based ad, really ?

[Travis]

Supposedly, this is an ad which is relevant to your interest , at the difference of a contextual ad, which is relevant to the content of the page your are visiting (note that if you are visiting a page, it certainly means you have an interest for its content, and so, contextual ad becomes relevant to your interest,....)

By the way, Adsense identifies you like "Star wars", you visit a site about making cakes, you might see ads about "star wars cakes"... Ok, that's the idea... but in real life, I have the impression that "interested-based ads" are only re-targetting ads, you know, you visit a product page from Amazon, ebay, or another online store, then, for the next few days, weeks or months, you 'll keep seeing ads featuring this product, over and over ... and the worse being that, even if you already bought this product, you'll continue to see ads about it ! so where is all the smartness and AI in this ?

May be this can influence people, who were unsure to buy the product,...

[surfgatinho]

Besides the previously viewed product type ads I can't say I'm particularly impressed how Adsense targets me. I may be an outlier but I think they'd do better with contextual ads.

[Travis]

I think they'd do better with contextual ads.

Same feeling

[NickMNS]

I think they'd do better with contextual ads.

Nobody cares what you think, and more importantly neither should you. (okay that was a little crude...)

Check your stats, then you will know!
Performance Reports => Advanced Reports => Targeting Types
In my case: Personalized ads account for roughly 1/3 of all impressions and in terms of RPM perform marginally better than contextual ads there is only a difference of a few pennies.

[Travis]

In my case, contextual and interested based ads have roughly the same RPM; this doesn't meant that if I disable interest based ads for everybody, that it will be the same of course. So, since one month (!) I am running the experiment tool of Adsense, with and without interested based ads, but this tool is still not succeeding to tell which option is better (!)

(still in my case), contextual ads have a 3 times higher CTR than personalized ads (with lower CPC, advertisers are certainly pushed to pay more for personalized ads, with the target to have higher conversion on their side). And, something to consider is, the higher the CTR is, "may be" the best it helps Adsense to profile your user, and improve ads selection. Just a thought.

[NickMNS]

contextual and interested based ads have roughly the same RPM

contextual ads have a 3 times higher CTR than personalized ads

One should be agnostic in terms of bid type CPC or CPM, the key is to get paid by any means, RPM is the measure to watch as it does not account for bid type. If RPM is the same, then it should make no difference. I agree there maybe a significant impact if you suddenly switch off personalized ads. This factors into the demand side of the equation. If you block (in your case) half the demand (personalized ads) then the price will certainly fall.

This has the potential to presents a unique opportunity to publishers. If many publishers switch off personalized ads, advertisers wanting to use these ads will face a drop in supply and that will push up prices and the only beneficiaries will be those publishers offering that option. Thus making users that consent very valuable. The question then becomes, will this increase in price make it such that personalized will no longer be profitable for the advertisers?

[Travis]

it's unrelated, but, I wonder if advertising through interest based ads (re-targeting), can have a negative impact, on advertisers/brands. I often hear about people fed up of being "followed" all over the internet, by the products they've looked at once. So I wonder if on the length this can cause a negative image of these advertisers. Especially is people are more and more concerned about privacy and tracking on the Internet.

[MayankParmar]

The contextual ads earnings is exactly double of personalized ads with same impressions.

[Travis]

I suspect that interested based ads are progressively fading, but of privacy settings at the level of web browsers. I noticed more and more people aware and using the incognito / private mode browsing of browsers. Where cookies are not saved once the browser is closed, which is certainly impacting interested based ads tracking.

[Rasputin]

In addition to the demand factor explained by nickmns above there is also a supply factor - if your site is in a niche that has competing places for contextual ads, removing interest based ads will increase the spaces available and reduce the price contextual advertisers need to pay for each ad.

To counteract this publishers should perhaps reduce the ad spaces available, but in practice are likely to increase ad spaces (to compensate for lower income) making the problem even more significant.

[surfgatinho]

Do you think interest based ads might be particularly appealing to big / brand-name publishers?
I'm wondering this because such companies could probably fill their ad spaces with non-Adsense / direct advertising. However, interest based ads would provide them with something extra.

[Travis]

This could be interesting to hear about people who are also advertisers, and see how they perceive contextual vs interested based advertising.