Google Targets Users With Behavior-Based Ads

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced Wednesday that it will begin offering ads on YouTube and on its partner AdSense sites using what it terms "interest-based advertising," which tracks users' online behavior and displays ads based on the sites they have visited in the past.

To date, Google says it has not widely deployed such a tightly targeted campaign, maintaining it instead has primarily targeted its ads based on users' online activities in the moment.

"So if you search for digital cameras on Google, you'll get ads related to digital cameras. If you are visiting the Web site of one of our AdSense partners, you would see ads based on the content of the page," said Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management, in a company blog post.

However, unlike previous advertising tactics, Google's new behavior-targeted advertising will associate categories of interest -- such as travel, sports or kitchen supplies -- with users' browsers, based on the sites they have previously visited and the types of pages they viewed.

Google's targeting tactics will include advertising cookies designed to track patterns of online users' behavior to determine their interests and preferences. Users will be placed into one or more of 600 categories based on their personal interests. Once a user's interests are determined, advertisers will target their ads accordingly. For example, if a user is deemed a skydiver, then a skydiving service might display ads, even if the user browses other sites.

Google's behavioral advertising project will occur on thousands of partnering Web sites on its content network on which the search engine giant places pictorial ads and text. However, the targeted ads won't be based around information acquired from Google search engine searches, the company claims.

Initially, 20 to 50 advertisers approved by Google will run ads in the first phase of the program, but the advertiser base is set to significantly expand later this year. Wojcicki said that Google's new advertising method will make its ads more relevant to its user base and more effective for the advertisers, which ultimately, the search engine giant acknowledges, will drive profits for both the advertisers and publishers hosting the ads.

"By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers," Wojcicki said.

However, behavioral advertising has raised some concerns among certain privacy rights groups, such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit public policy organization on Internet issues, which has said that targeted advertising will violate user privacy rights and reduce consumer choice.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is in the process of an ongoing examination of online behavioral advertising while proposing revisions and principles to oversee self-regulatory efforts that protect consumers' privacy as data is collected on their online habits.

However, Google defends its new approach to advertising by maintaining that it will not log personal identifying information that users submit online or include sensitive subjects to target, such as health care and religion, in its ad targeting.

In an effort to make its beta testing more palatable, Google created a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets the user view, delete or add interest categories associated with the browser, ostensibly so they can receive more ads that are of interest.

Google also emphasized that users have the choice to view, manage and opt out of advertising cookies, and can save an opt-out function permanently to their browser settings. In addition, Google offers a tool created to opt out of several third-party ad servers and networks' cookies simultaneously.