Google Rolls Out Behavioral Targeting To All AdWords Advertisers

Jun 23, 2011 at 6:09pm ET by Pamela Parker

Google is finally rolling out the ability to target ads to users by interest — based on their previous browsing activity, or behavior — to all of its advertisers. The company first announced a beta test of this capability more than two years ago, back in 2009, and it has slowly been introducing it to larger groups over time. The company says the capabilities are available today.

The announcement marks Google’s full entrance into the world of behavioral targeting in AdWords.

The system looks at the types of pages that a user visits, considering how recently and frequently the person visits those sites, and associates that browser cookie with the appropriate interest categories. Users can view and edit the categories they’ve been associated at Google’s Ad Preferences page, and opt out entirely, if they so desire.

Advertisers can choose from over 1,000 interest categories. Google says advertisers testing the capability were successful, citing one advertiser increasing brand lift by 40% and a shoe railer driving 400% more conversions at a lower cost-per-sale. Pricing is on a cost-per-click model with an auction.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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http://cfoxchange.com Jonathon Frampton

Finally! JK, still don’t know if this is one of those keep me private deals or if I am just happy to be able to refine my Adwords efforts???
jmb98115

Great, now I will have to root/jailbreak my phone and add an appropriate 127.0.0.1 entry for all Google ads.
http://www.artifxmedia.com AMI

Really it is about time. Capturing our targets attention is increasingly more difficult. This will help.
beatrice baker

Wonderful news! Increased return on promotional efforts will benefit from Google’s targeting efforts. http://www.melmarketinggroup.com
daveb

Pamela,

when I look in my adwords accounts I still only see this option if the display network is chosen and not for the search network. I cannot see anything in your article that specifies if that is the case or not. Do yo have any knowledge if this is available for text ads on the search network? Thanks.

Dave
http://www.ivantemelkov.com Ivan Temelkov

Google has been fooling around with behavioral targeting for quite some time now. I’m actually curious to find out the success rate and ROI on this.
http://www.realcreatives.com Malcolm Rasala

Morally repugnant. There is something very nasty about a service that wants to snoop on the private actions of a free human being to line its shareholders pockets with ever more money. Is nothing sacred? Hopefully there will be a growing wall of opposition to this ‘money-centred’ myopic little view of the world. To treat ones fellow man with such noxious intent indicates the extraordinarily narrow minds running this morally repugnant intrusion into our private lives. Shocking!!! History will record this with the contempt it deserves
http://www.realcreatives.com Malcolm Rasala

PS

Do no evil WAS the Google byword we were told. What could be more evil (other than physical cruelty) than feeding minds with specious propaganda they have not freely requested. Its kind of what the communists did to brainwash captured POW’s. Nuts? Think about it long deep and hard. Do you want to propagandized to 24/7 with messages about things you do not want?. What is propaganda otherwise. Surely there has to be some small area of our lives that advertisers have no right to enter?