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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 behavioral, google, online advertising, Uncategorized
7 Comments »

  • Chris

    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!

  • Emily

    Were you looking for coffee for your office?

  • Terri

    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…?

  • http://www.parser.ca/z678 George D.

    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..

  • Marlon

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

  • Amanda

    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.

  • Brian

    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