Google AdSense

Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience; helping them do that should drive more revenue to your websites. This week we're announcing plans to provide interest-based advertising across AdSense publisher sites to help achieve that goal. In the past, advertisers have taken advantage of contextual and placement-targeted advertising on AdSense publisher sites. With this enhancement they'll also be able to reach users based on their previous interactions with them, such as visits to the advertiser website, as well as reach users on the basis of their interests (such as "sports enthusiasts" or "travel enthusiasts").

Over the next few months we'll start offering interest-based advertising to a limited number of advertisers as part of a beta, and expand the offering later in 2009. Whether the advertiser's goal is to drive brand awareness or increase responses to their ads, these capabilities can help expand the success of their campaigns and should increase your earnings as advertiser participation increases.

To develop interest categories, we'll recognize the types of webpages users visit across the AdSense network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we'll add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. You can visit the Help Center to learn more about how interest categories will be developed and your associated account settings. As a result of this launch, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.

Users browsing the web will benefit from the additional relevancy that interest-based ads can provide. And by visiting the new Ads Preferences Manager, users can see what interest categories we think they fall into, or add and remove categories themselves. The Ads Preferences Manager can be found by clicking on most "Ads by Google" links you see on Google ads throughout the web.

You can read more about how interest-based advertising benefits the online ecosystem and about the privacy innovations developed for this launch in the Official Google Blog and the Google Public Policy Blog.

We look forward to providing users with ads more closely tied to their interests, helping advertisers reach their campaign goals, and helping you to monetize your website most effectively.