Google launches new ad settings with which users can have more control over the data the search engine uses to show them personalized ads during their browsing.
Transparency and control of personal data are today fundamental pieces to ensure a good experience with online advertising. Taking this into account, Google has proposed to offer the user an increasingly greater control over the privacy of the ads they see during the use of the platform and for that, for several years now, has launched tools designed for this purpose.
The "Ad Settings" service launched in early 2009 is a tool in which the user is able to access and modify their preferences about the ads they see, later, in 2011, the function was added to this service " Why this announcement? " , Designed to provide the maximum possible information about the reasons why we view certain ads.
In 2012 the "Silence ad" option was also released, which allows us to " block " ads that do not interest us so that they are not shown to us anymore. Finally, in 2015, all these functions were unified in your call "Google Account" where you can access and manage all your personal data and your information about privacy and security.
What Google presents to us today is a new format of the Ads Configuration service that is much easier to use.
In this new service, we can see at once all the factors that the search engine takes into account when showing certain ads. In this way the user will have much easier control when it comes to understanding why you see the ads What do you see? Choose those you want to be shown in the future and eliminate those with whom you do not feel any kind of affinity.
How do the ads adapt to my interests?
Google, when deciding which ads to show, takes into account a series of factors :
- The data that we give you when we register in a Google service (age, sex, location ...)
- The information related to our activity while we navigate with a session started, mainly to searches.
Imagine that you searched in Google "tips for Instagram", the search engine will assume that you have an interest in social networks and will assign this factor when you show an ad.
The objective of using this information is none other than to help make the advertisements shown to users more useful and meaningful to them.
Now, with this new Ads Settings, we can activate and deactivate factors according to our preferences.
If we disable any factor , we will stop seeing ads related to it in all Google services and associated websites, as long as we have our Google session started.
In addition, we can also disable the option of personalized ads but we will continue to see ads. Of course, the ads that we will see will be based on purely generic factors that will have nothing to do with our interests and, ultimately, will be less useful.
See what all the ad display factors are and personalize them to your liking here.