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10.01.07
Personalization Of Adwords Ads
 By Christine Parfitt
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" (Click to see full image).
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)
Comments
About
the Author:
Christine Parfitt is a search marketing strategist and the founder of Semfire, a search marketing company based in Australia. She specialises in paid search and shares news and best practices at Semfire Search Engine Marketing Blog.
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