Navigation

What Is Interest-Based Advertising?

By Vickie J. Scanlon


What is Interest-Based Advertising Defined

Interest-based advertising enables advertisers to reach users based on their interests and allows them to show ads based on a user's previous interaction. Why is this important? Because Google is in the process of a launch of the new interest-based advertising feature.

Google's hope is to help to better monetize your website more efficiently, increase value for advertisers and provide users ads that are more closely tied to their interest. Over the next few months Google will start offering interest-based advertising to a limited number of advertisers as part of a beta, before expanding to others later in 2009.

You (the publishers of the ads) will know that you have this feature if you look in "My Accounts" within your Google Adsense. If you have the Interest-based Ads Preference within your "My Accounts" or have been notified by Google, you will be required to update your Privacy Policy to reflect the change in privacy to users. But first things, first. How does it work?


How Does It Work

Google will use what they call the "DoubleClick DART" cookie to display AdSense for content ads. When users either view or click on the ad, a cookie may be dropped on that end user's browser. The data from the cookies are then used to help AdSense publishers
to better serve and manage the ads on the publisher's site(s).


Changes  to Accommodate Interest-based Advertising

There are no ad code changes needed to prepare for the launch of interest-based advertising, except...

You will need to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date by April 8, 2009. Here is what you should put in your privacy policy.

Per Google the following information should be included in
your privacy policy.

* Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
* Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
* Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.