Is Google taking behavioral data to display?

July 18th, 2008

I was just browsing on my gender test blog post and noticed the following ad:

So normally you’d say — so what mike, it’s just an ad for senseo! Well this ad is special because I was just searching for Senseo coffee pods earlyt his morning (both via Google & Amazon.com). I find it highly unlikely that this is a pure coincidence. Here’s the clickstream (broken into multiple lines and shortened for legibility):

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick?sa=L&ai=BSrzSV[...]
http://www.sharesenseo.com/index.jsp?q=a-googlewomen

Funny that there is a nice “q=a-googlewomen” inserted into the landing page — I swear the gender test showed me to be a man!! So this is all purely speculative of course, but if this is indeed true then we suddenly have the world’s best behavioral display network to compete with.

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Posted by Mike Filed in Uncategorized, behavioral, google, online advertising

7 Responses to “Is Google taking behavioral data to display?”

  1. Chris Says:
    July 18th, 2008 at 7:08 pm

    Yes, same thing has happened to me…but it was related to a medical condition and searching for related doctors…..then targeted later that day for cure’s for my ailment on non-contextual pages.

    Coffee is interesting, medical conditions is crossing the line!

  2. Emily Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 9:45 am

    Were you looking for coffee for your office?

  3. Terri Says:
    July 29th, 2008 at 11:14 am

    I was getting wedding adds constantly before …. my wedding. They stopped after my status changed on a few sites and switched over to weight loss. I guess I should have indicated somewhere that I’m fit…?

  4. George D. Says:
    August 1st, 2008 at 9:02 am

    I had recently experienced the same ‘what’s going on here’ in a way I hadn’t noticed before. While researching various sites offering a particular product, I was of course getting related adverts in the search results. But then I eventually switched search topics, only to see more specific and highly accurate adverts related to my earlier search (but this after some time had passed).

    I speculate that if your search doesn’t bring up sufficient ads, then google reverts to adverts based upon previously performed searches. It was almost as if Google was reminding me that it’s not too late to back and shop for those Adirondack chairs I was looking for..

  5. Marlon Says:
    August 1st, 2008 at 8:51 pm

    Maybe just selective perception on your end? They could have just placed a bid on “women”, which is a string contained in the textarea.

  6. Amanda Says:
    February 2nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    I’ve noticed I’m getting alot of bigger penis ads in my yahoo inbox and also in other sites that have advertising on them. Its quite annoying. I did the test and came up as 81% male so maybe that’s way I’m getting them.

  7. Brian Says:
    April 17th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    Google does save your behaviour and url.
    When you use Google’s service they simply match your earlier visited web pages with the Ads.

    For further reeding visit:
    - http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6084
    - http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html

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