San Francisco — Search engine titan Google Inc. growingly feels the pinch of recession will now employ a new tactics to strengthen it cash-cow, will use its surveillance of Web surfing habits to ascertain which ads are best suited to each individual’s interests, is introducing today the beta test of the new behavioral ad targeting scheme onto YouTube and partner sites in its AdSense advertising network — though it has cautiously avoided the term behavioral ad targeting.
Google prefers to call the new program as “interest-based advertising,” a practice that brings to light just how much the Internet search leader has been learning about millions of people around the world.
Google is giving behavioral advertising a new dimension. The new program is being launched on a test basis, according to an announcement on Google’s blog on Wednesday, which states that someone who frequents sites about dogs might see more ads for flea treatment products even when visiting another Web destination that has nothing to do with pets.
The Web search giant will tap the data it collects on you — you search habits and preferences — and will send your way adds closely linked with your Web surfing preferences.
This new concept of advertising from Google, goes much deeper than the current targeted advertising practice of Website-based ad targeting. It almost tracks the user’s Internet usage habits in order to serve an ad better suited for you.
Regardless of what you call it, YouTube and AdSense sites are now beaming ads to web surfers based on the (many) pages they have flipped through in the past.
“We think there is real value to seeing ads that are more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit and the things that interest you,” Google’s VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki wrote this morning in a blog post entitled “Making ads more interesting.”
“Today, we are introducing ‘interest-based’ advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will combine categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.”
Google refers to the new system as a beta. But it calls everything a beta. The Web searching company said the new system will greatly benefit the end user because it will offer better-suited ads.
“We are attempting to make ads even more interesting,” says Brad Bender, a Google product management director.
The system will employ electronic markers on the user’s Web browsers called cookies in order to track the visited Web sites. E.g., if you visit NBA.com quite often, you may get some ads on sites that sell basketball jerseys, ticket to NBA games in the town you’re in or something of that sort.
The program banks on technology that Google got last year in a $3.2 billion acquisition of the Internet ad service DoubleClick Inc. Some of the opposition to the deal revolved around potential privacy intrusions, but Google overcame those misgivings during an extensive review to win regulators’ approval for the deal.
The ads, set to debut within the next few weeks, initially will appear on Google’s YouTube and thousands of other sites that belong to Google’s ad network.
The sharp turnaround comes just a few weeks after the Web search leader’s smaller rival, Yahoo Inc., brought out its own advertising enhancements, which rely on an individual’s online activity.
Nevertheless, Google’s adoption of this “behavioral” targeting is more troubling to privacy watchdogs. That is because the Mountain View-based company already has used its dominant position in the Internet search market to build a huge database of potentially sensitive information about the kinds of things that people are looking for on the Web.
Now, if Google takes it a step further by tracking people’s favorite Web sites to define individual tastes and then bundles up ads falling under the same areas of interest. And so the company has escalated its monitoring activity in December when it began putting a sliver of DoubleClick’s computer code, called a “cookie,” on its advertising partners’ Web sites. And privacy watchdogs are viewing this issue very seriously.
“This is a very serious development,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I do not think the world’s largest search engine should be in the business of profiling people.”
Rotenberg is expecting Google’s embrace of behavioral targeting would prompts the Federal Trade Commission to take another look at the DoubleClick acquisition and perhaps mandate privacy safeguards.
Wishing to avert a backlash and appease regulators, Google has set up its system so individuals can specify their areas of interest or shun certain forms of advertising at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences.
“We are pleased that our launch of interest-based advertising includes innovative, consumer-friendly features to provide meaningful transparency and choice for our users,” Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, wrote in a Wednesday blog posting.
The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, applauded Google for creating a “gold standard” that puts the company’s stamp on behavioral targeting ads and provides clear explanations on how to avoid them. The group brushed off the criticism of Google’s expansion into behavioral targeting as “paroxysms of privacy hysteria.”
However, advertising based on consumer interest or behavior have the probability to increase consumer response and so-called click-through rates, which translates into higher ad revenue for the sites.
But U.S. lawmakers held hearings last year on behavioral advertising, after concerns arose when a company called NebuAd, in a deal with cable company Charter Communication, disclosed a pilot program to track customers.
Congressman Rick Boucher, head of the telecom subcommittee of the House of Representative’s Energy and Commerce, has said the issue will be a top priority this year. The Virginia Democrat’s office had no immediate comment on Google’s plans.