Personalisation of Adwords Ads
I’ve started to notice personalisation happening in the delivery of adwords. An example came up today when I searched for “wedding celebrants melbourne”. I noticed an ad for “string quartet melbourne” and then searched separately for “string quartets melbourne”. I was shown a mix of ads for wedding celebrants and string quartets. Any search for string quartets after that had only relevant string quartet ads, no celebrant ads. I was able to replicate these searches with the same results.
A bit of digging and I came across a similar observation in wiep.net. The story was picked up by Search Engine Land who received this explanation from Google.
What you’re seeing is that we look at the user’s previous query and see how well it intersects with the current query. If it’s significant, we’ll use it to help targeting on the current query. We simply look at what’s in the referring URL (every time you load a web page, the HTTP header includes your previous URL as the “referrer”).
Here’s my sequence of searches and the results:
Search #1 for “wedding celebrants melbourne”
Search #2 for “string quartets melbourne” (see the mix of ads for string quartets and celebrants)
Search #3 for “string quartets melbourne” (celebrant ads no longer there)
Posted in Google AdWords Advanced
September 28th, 2007 at 12:45 am
Hi Christine,
We noticed the same thing happening a couple of months ago, see the details here >> http://www.foundagency.com/blog/2007/08/is-this-a-google-bug.html
Keep up the good work with your blog, it’s one of the few Australian search blogs I read.
cheers,
Simon
September 28th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Hi Simon,
Thanks for reading and for the comment. I was interested to see your example. It makes a mockery of the explanation from Google that they
“look at the user’s previous query and see how well it intersects with the current query”
Child care and car insurance are hardly related!