Toronto (ECN) - As the world of online advertising continue to evolve so does the way that ads are viewed on the internet.
Over the past ten years Google Ads have created enormous competition for the lucrative pay per click advertising space.
As time has went by, many of it’s competitors such as Yahoo and other third party brokers have used cookies on your web browser to determine what ads you would be most interested in seeing based on the web sites that you have visited in addition to which sites you placed something in the shopping cart then left the without checking out. This is called behavioral ad targeting.
In a major reversal of policy Google is now going to be using behavioral ad targeting to show you only those ads that are of most interest to you.
In the past Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has expressed concern about using this technique for ad targeting. Effective March 11th the company will now be using behavior advertising as a part of its Google Ads network.
The way it works is it will involve placing information from your web browser (minus the personal information) from 500 to 600 web sites to determine which ads would be of most interest to you.
The network will then place you into one of 600 different categories based on the different web sites that you have visited.
Over the next two weeks the company will allow 40 to 50 advertisers which have been approved by Google to start using the new program, which will be available to all of it’s advertisers before the end of the year.
The ad targeting will not include information from Google searches and is expected to bring the company a larger piece of the current pay per click market where they only hold a 2% market share.
As Susan Wojkicki, Google’s vice president of product management wrote on Google’s official blog, “This morning the (behavioral) targeting fits with the notion of Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page that ads can and should be at least as useful to people as search results and other online content.”
What this shows is that the world of online advertising is changing at an incredible rate of speed. What was one unthinkable, Google going into behavioral ad targeting, has now become a reality. Over the short term this is unlikely to have any major effect on the company; however, over the next several years it is very possible that Google could dominate this market as well.
