- 45
- Sphinn It!
Posted By: storyspinner 45 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.thinkseer.com)
Category: Google
Here’s the problem…the ad for a CMMS/EAM software appears to be BEHAVIORAL, yes I said it. I was logged out of my account when the ad showed.
I only visited that site because I talked about how they are spamming in a tweet.
This sounds like behavioral targeting to me in some way, shape, or form. Why else would a Google Knol page show an UNRELATED ad (I was on a backpacking page) for something I searched for and a site I visited almost 22 days ago?
5 Comments


Comments
Interesting. Like to know more, and could see it happened for other reasons, though.
certainly got my attention :)
Wil's on his way to San Fran, hopefully he'll explain more when he lands!
Start asking, my flight is delayed 100 minutes - I'll break it all down.
- I have a new client who competes with tero.ca
- As part of my research I was seeing who was in their landscape, that is how I found tera.co
- I posted the find to my twitter on July 7th
- Obviously I don't have too much to learn from that site - so I haven't visited it since.
- Fast forward to today, I am on Google Knol doing some research on it like any good SEO should. I was not logged into my google account at the time.
- I decided to do that query based on an article I read on blogoscoped
- I saw that page with the ad for tero.ca
Based on seeing that Ad I deduced the following:1 - There has to be some behavioral element at play because I haven't been to that site in 17 days
2 - The ad was TOTALLY unrelated to the content
3 - Google has the ability to target ads based on the content of a page (adsense)
4 - So why would I see an unrelated ad for a site I was on 17 days ago?
Please shoot holes in this theory, I want to figure out how I culd be wrong.
Maybe it is just a bit of a bug - since "backpack" could be in relation to the personal mgmt software AND other advertisers have the content network off (if Knol is part of the content network).
Was looking at a couple other knols (wood trim and kitchen faucet installation) and the ads seem appropriate. Thoughts?
BTW - I was logged in to Gmail (inadvertantly) so I checked on another machine and saw similar results