The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Yesterday morning, Google announced the beta launch of a new targeting mechanism based on user interests.  The New York Times and Search Engine Land both provided great coverage of the high-level points.  

Here at Clickable, we want to highlight some key points for what this means to you:

• The beta test of this new ad targeting is open to only "a limited number of advertisers".  The number is not clear yet, but the announcements say it should open up to everyone later this year.
• Interest-targeted ads appear only on the content network.  Google.com and search partners will not target according to interests.
  
• The beta seems to be open only to a limited number of publishers, including YouTube.  The announcements are a little vague on this point.  They are probably starting this out with their highest-quality content partners.  AdSense has always been opaque with publishers about how ads are matched to a specific page or site, so it might not be possible for a publisher to tell if interest-based targeting has been enabled for their site.
  
• "Interests" are learned by monitoring user behavior.  For example, if a user visits ESPN.com a lot, they’ll be tagged as having a "sports" interest.
  
• Users can self-identify their interests. There’s a new tool from Google, accessible by clicking on any "Ads by Google" link, that will let users identify whether or not they are interested in a particular area.  Though this is a simple concept, Google is the first major ad network to provide this kind of control for users, making it a major step forward in how users interact with ads.
  
• Interests seem to be very-broadly defined categories.  So, for example, they might target ads based on some notion that you’re interested in "photography", but they are unlikely to target ads based on a particular model of camera you have researched in the past.
  
• Search query history is NOT used to identify interests.  The Google blog posts announcing this feature were oddly silent on this point, but through our own direct conversations with Googlers, as well as some interviews they gave in other publications, we have confirmed that search queries will not be used to identify interests.  Google should be commended here for keeping that data out of the equation – they probably could have achieved higher revenue by incorporating search data, but they opted for greater user privacy instead.
  

We expect that this feature will help drive monetization on sites where contextual targeting tends not to work.  This can include everything from news sites, where certain news stories don’t map well onto advertising opportunities, to social networking sites, where users are generally not in a transaction-seeking mindset.  

The entire team at Clickable will be watching the progress of the beta closely, and we will integrate it into our tool as soon as Google exposes this new functionality through their API.