Google: What would you like to see today?

by Gary Illyes

Remember that Microsoft slogan, “Where do you want to go today” ? It was the beginning of a new era when that slogan popped up for the first time on your Windows. Now Google AdSense arrives in a new state.
Advolution has begun.

Imagine a web where you see only content which is interesting for you. You won’t see James Bond trailers, because you don’t like the agent 007, but you will see Oceans’ 14 trailers because you like the series. YouTube won’t recommend you AC/DC videos, when you like Britney Spears and Amazon will not suggest you buying Harry Potter books when you’re a geek and have a bad opinion about Harry Potter.

And finally, you won’t see travel related ads, because you are interested only in internet related ads. This is Web 3.0. And this is what the Google Ads Team brought one step closer by letting you specify your interests and then serving for you only ads related to your interests.

This is an opt-out/in feature provided by Google. The well known contextual targeting –which works as it works, usually don’t– will still remain the same, this will be only an add-on. But it should increase the user experience considerably.

The way how this feature works is rather simple. When the users select their interest on a specially designed page, a cookie is set. Then, when the user with the cookie set visits a page on which there are AdSense ads, the ad-serving engine will look for the cookie and will select ads based on the user’s interests. This is a feature which was asked by the AdWords advertisers for a very long time.

Even though there is nothing to fear of, users can also opt-out of this feature and then Google will not set this cookie. If you feel the need you have to specify your interests, head on to www.google.com/ads/preferences