I haven’t seen this before, but Google is showing me AdWords ads that are partially targeted to my previous search queries. Looks like Google is taking personalized search to the next level.
17 Comments
17 Comments
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Comments
You stole my content colleague :-) Nice post!
Wow, total Sphinn on that. Very good catch and breakdown. Notice that you’re not logged in, right? So it’s not personalized in the sense of likely using your stored search history. But it does seem like they are probably tracking you by cookie, lookign at your previous queries (within a particular search session, rather than over time), and tailoring that way.
Wow. So I just searched for travel, then for sale, and bang! There are some travel ads showing up. Then I searched for computers, then online and got computer ads. I moved over to another browser (without any stored history), searched for online, got nothing. So I searched for computers, then online -- boom! Hello ads, lots of them, all about computers. Wow. I’m kicking this one out directly to Hot Topics and also edit the title a bit.
Barry tells me he spotted this happening about a month ago and did an SER post on it. That got past me. Barry -- URL?
yes, has been happening for a while now but it is still cool. Try searching then visiting a site with adsense. Search for holidays for a bit then go to a golf club website with adsense. BANG ’golf holidays’ I think it is pretty cool
Got the URL from Barry: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013272.html And from the WMW discussion here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3320868.htm I remember this now from April, but it sounds like all AdSense targeting. Looking at the WMW thread, I see later in the comments someone wondering if their search history was influencing ads, based on changes they were seeing.
Here is the URL http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013272.html No examples, of course, because it is a WMW thread.
Glad to see other people are noticing this. I blogged about it a few days back at http://www.benmurphydesign.com/2007/07/13/is-google-adwords-showing-ads-for-previous-searches/ It still seems to be inconsistent, some users are experiencing this, some aren’t.
nice find
I’ve been getting these personalized ads for ages. Especially with Adsense on "low content" pages. Nothing special imho.
I came across the SER post when I did a search for "Personalized Google Ads" to see if this was new. Must have hooked off after seeing the Adsense part. The WMW thread is new to me, though.
We checked with Google about this and got back a bit more info: "What you’re seeing is that we look at the user’s previous query and see how well it intersects with the current query. If it’s significant, we’ll use it to help targeting on the current query. We simply look at what’s in the referring URL (every time you load a web page, the HTTP header includes your previous URL as the "referrer")."
Here’s another WMW thread about it: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3376849.htm The only way to get around this personalization is to use the Ad Preview Tool, which can be done by appending &adtest=on to the URL. And there’s a lot more to it than just looking at the referer of the previous query. The less you click on ads for a particular domain, the lower the ad position on further queries. This can have quite an impact for large advertisers like eBay. You might be able to see this effect for yourself if there are queries you perform regularly... for those ones, compare the ads shown with the Ad Preview Tool against those shown in the regular kind of search.
The idea occurred to me the other day after reading Bills summary of the Quality Score patent. It just seemed to me that that’s what the goal was without actually spelling it out.
Here is a link to Bills article. http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=717 This was my thought at the time... It looks like they are trying to provide “Personalized PPC Results” We already know… Google rearranges the organic results based on your historical click behavior… Why not reposition the sponsored listings based on the same personal data as well. This would help to maximize profits for Google as they zero-in on the users who already prefer “Brand X”. (The rich get richer)
Believe me they DO rearrange organic results. They’ve been testing this for a long time off an on and now it seems to be permanent. SEM clients have been beating up their consultants for a long time over this. When you search on certain phrases and don’t click on them Google slides them down in the results. Advertisers tend to search on their own keyword phrases so their ads disappear FOR THEM and they complain to their PPC managers about position. I just had a client confirm that by going to someone else’s computer and not logging in. He wrote back relieved that what I told him was true. This is yet one other reason for the volatility of ad positions in Google AdWords.
Sorry, I’ve been awake a long time responding to all the great Sphinn. I meant Google does rearrange the PPC ads shown in the organic listings.