Your data on Google

Advertising

You wouldn’t expect a magazine about fishing to be full of advertising about dance music or video games. It makes more sense to show ads about things readers are likely to be interested in, such as new angling gear. On the Internet, the same is true: websites usually try to show you advertising that they think is likely to be of interest, which makes sense for you, the website owner and for the advertiser.

We try to show you relevant ads and we use some clues to your preferences to help us do this, both on Google Search and across the web.

Search

The ads that appear on Google Search are targeted based on your search queries. If you type “cheap flights”, for example, into Google, you will probably see sponsored links at the top of the page and on the right hand side showing ads from travel companies. To decide which ad to show you, the automated system looks at the search query that you enter, the relevance of the ads to this query and how much the advertiser is prepared to pay in the auction and, in some cases, your very recent query history, amongst other factors. These are examples of contextual ads as they are related to what you are looking for on that page at that time.

Interest-based advertising

In addition to the sponsored links you see on Search, Google places ads across the web by acting as an intermediary between advertisers and website owners. In some cases these are contextual like search ads, i.e. they are based on the content of the web page where they appear. In other cases they are interest-based ads and these are shown because we’ve made a guess at the types of things likely to interest you. We base this on other pages you’ve previously visited. So if you’ve visited many gardening sites, you may see more gardening ads across the web.

This is how it works:

Throughout this process we don’t store your name or keep any personal information about you. We just recognize the number stored in your browser, and show ads related to the interest categories associated with your cookie (so we’re recognizing your browser, not you). We don’t show ads based on sensitive information or interests, like race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories.

You can control which types of ads you see using Ads Preferences Manager. This allows you to change the interest categories associated with your browser (or if you don’t want us to store your interests at all, you can opt-out altogether).

Ads in Gmail

Ads that appear in Gmail are similar to the ads that appear next to Google search results and on content pages throughout the web. In Gmail, ads are related to the content of your messages. Our goal is to provide Gmail users with ads that are useful and relevant to their interests.

Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information. This type of automated scanning is how many email services, not just Gmail, provide features like spam and virus filtering and spell checking. Ads are selected for relevance and served by Google computers using the same contextual advertising technology that powers Google’s AdSense program.

Only ads classified as family safe are distributed through our content network and to your Gmail inbox. Also, we are careful about the types of content we serve ads against. For example, Google may block certain ads from running next to an email about catastrophic news. In addition, we will not target ads based on sensitive information, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories. You can control the use of these signals from the Gmail Settings page. Read more in the Help Center.

Interest-based advertising

It’s good to know how ads are targeted by Google to make them more relevant to you. Read the next topic: How search results are personalized when you use Web History with a Google Account

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