September 20th, 2009 | 
Author: Some of you may or may not be aware that Google are about to introduce interest based advertising for their PPC network. It is important for you to realise how this will effect you both as a web publisher and also as a web searcher.
What is interest based advertising?
Interest based advertising is all about showing web searchers adverts based on their actual interests overall. For example, Joe Bloggs is interested in cycling, wind sufing, chess and tropical fish. Google will now show Joe Bloggs adverts on chess, tropical fish and wind surfing when he is visiting a site on car insurance.
Privacy Issues
There are many ad networks already that use interest based advertising and this form of advertising has always been controversial because it brings into question the web user’s privacy. To know what ads to show then the ad network need to know your interests. To know your interests they have to track what sites you are visiting. To achieve this they plant a cookie on your computer which tracks the sites you visit.
Thankfully if this fills you with fear then Google say that they only track sites which are not sensitive and not medical sites etc.. However if you still don’t want Google to know what sites you are visiting then you can opt out altogether from interest based advertising. You can do that by visiting this page.
What Do I Need To Do As A Web Publisher?
In short, nothing really as it is mainly based on the preferences of the web user. However, you do have the option as Adsense publisher to switch Interest based advertising on or off under your account settings page in your Adsense account. Just go to My Account/Account Settings and you will see the option there.
What this will mean to you though and it is fairly fundamental is that your site will show ads that are not necessarily relevant to your site’s content anymore. Also, the ads that will be displayed will be relevant only to the web user visiting your site.
This will also affect the ads you see on your own site so don’t be suprised to see irrelevant ads when you visit your own site.
Is This Going To Be A Good Or Bad Thing For Us Web Publishers?
Time will tell how this affects our bottom line and whether it will result in higher click throughs. One interesting aspect is that you could have a site in the relatively unlucrative niche of tropical fish. A visitor to your site could be interested in mesothlioma and be shown very lucrative ads about mesothelioma on your site! However, the opposite might be true also..
This also could impact on the way we choose niches for our Adsense sites if the content is no longer as relevant to the ads shown. It might no longer be as important to pick expensive keywords. Of course conetnt based relevance is always going to be used for the ads shown as well so don’t throw the baby out of the bath water yet but just be aware of how this might change things for you.
To read more about interest based advertising then take a look at this..
Thanks Stephen I did not know about this. I think Google snoops on us way too much already so I “opted out” of their system.
All The Best
Alex
Hey dude, I barely make 2 cents a day with my current blog http://monsterhunterunitecompendium.blogspot.com/ . How can i make it better for higher revenues? It is still at infancy stage but i guess i could work it out, any suggestions?
Hey senecaz, read this blog from end to end first. Also find a niche that has money!
Steve, thanks for the reminder about interest based advertising. I didn’t know that ist was possible to opt-out, but this only works as long as you don’t delete your cookies (or googles cookies) frequently.
Do you know if this has been introduced world wide or is still with the US/UK versions of google?
From a publishers point of view it would be interesting to see a differentiation in the stats between interest based and normal adsense.
Hi Sprachreisen,
It has been in Beta since April and now it is being rolled out everywhere I believe. If you look under your account settings you will see an option there for Interest based advertising. If you have the option to switch it on or off then it is enabled for you.
It seems like interest based adverts are good for sites with high traffic, best for high traffic sites in non-lucrative niches and not so good for the high CPC keyword heavy sites with maybe not so much traffic… thanks for the clarification on interest based advertising btw.
Thanks for the reminder Steven, but now I’m left with 2 decisions, and I hate decisions!
First off, should I opt out of the internet based advertising personally, and see adds on sites relavent to their content.
And more importantly, should I deactivate it on my adsense account, for adds on my sites???
What have you chosen steven?
Cheers
Dennis@4 marketing p’s blog
I expect that interest based advertising won’t have a huge impact on publishers who are tightly niche focussed because visitors to the a niche site would be expected to have a history of interest in the topic anyway (or that visiting a niche site would create that history and trigger focussed ads). I think the biggest impact will come to general sites and personal blogs. You would expect that interest based advertising placement would improve CPC on these sites. Looking forward to tracking the changes. Thanks Steve.
Hi Dennis, personally I am leaving everything as the default to see how it affects my experience as a web surfer and as an Adsense publisher. I will give it a chance at least.