If you’re paying attention, you should be seeing more relevant and targeted ads as you surf the web lately. This is due in large part to Google’s fairly recent implementation of “Interest-based advertising” through its adsense program.
Google explains their interest-based ad program here:
Interest-based advertising: How it works
Many websites, such as news sites and blogs, use Google’s AdSense program to show ads on their sites. It’s our goal to make these ads as relevant as possible for you. While we often show you ads based on the content of the page you are viewing, we also developed new technology that shows some ads based on interest categories that you might find useful.
Here’s an example that hit me square between the eyes recently. On April 26 I read this article about a $.69 iPad stand. It was really a business card holder from Office Depot that someone was now using to sit their iPad upright on their desk.
The post had a link to the product page on OfficeDepot.com which I clicked through to take a look at and eventually left without purchasing.
Fast forward 14 days and look at this ad I saw today on a completely non-office product related site:
Just wow. If you do any type of online advertising your head should be swimming with the possibilities.
Imagine the ability to reach people who you know have checked out your website and your products, and follow them around for days and weeks on the web.
Google explains the ability to do this from the “category” level (ie: someone likes gardening tools, you show them gardening tool ads). But the example I show above takes it all the way down to an SKU. And its not the only instance I’ve seen of this. I’ve got a beverage cooler/cart that I’ve been eyeing following me around the web too.
Some might say this is annoying, and if you’re in that camp you can adjust your preferences.
But for a marketer like me its fun and interesting to see this and think of all the possibilities to use this.
The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
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