Behavioral advertising always draws the ire of privacy advocates. Nonetheless, Google rolled out technology Wednesday that uses that principle.
Google isn’t calling it behavioral advertising. Rather, the search giant has labeled its initiative “interest-based” advertising and is testing the concept on its partner sites and on YouTube. Google calls it a move to drive relevance and improve the connection between advertisers and users.
“Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers,” said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of Google’s Product Management 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, e-mail, video and social networks.”
Google: Tell Us What You Want
Wojcicki set out to explain the difference between what Google has been doing and what Google plans to do through its new advertising technology.
Google has historically displayed ads based mainly on the searcher’s interest at the specific moment. A search for “digital camera” will pull ads for digital cameras, for example. And consumers reading the sports pages of a newspaper or blog might see an ad for the latest Nikes. But Google is convinced that isn’t always the best approach because a keyword or Web-page content doesn’t always generate the most relevant ads.
Google is also certain its “interest-based” efforts will yield more relevant ads by leveraging additional information about other Web sites people visit. Wojcicki said the ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. Google may then use those categories to show what it considers more relevant text and display ads.
“While interest-based advertising can infer your interest in adventure travel from the Web sites you…