Google To Add AdSense Features With DoubleClick Cookies Technology

The Google Blog announced that Google is improving the content network (aka AdSense) by leveraging the technology they have acquired with DoubleClick. First I’ll discuss the feature and then I will get into the privacy issues. The features that are coming in the upcoming months include: Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of […]

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The Google Blog announced that Google is improving the content network (aka AdSense) by leveraging the technology they have acquired with DoubleClick. First I’ll discuss the feature and then I will get into the privacy issues.


The features that are coming in the upcoming months include:

  • Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
  • Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
  • Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
  • View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.

The privacy issues:

To make this all work, Google needs to track you across the Google content network. They will embed a cookie on your machine to track how many times you have seen an ad within the Google network. So now, the DoubleClick ad serving cookie software is part of the Google content network, which is extremely significant in terms of Google being able to track you from site to site. Many sites run AdSense, and many sites also run DoubleClick ads. Google will track you from any site running either AdSense or DoubleClick served ads. They said you can opt out of these cookies as you see fit.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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