Privacy Centre Privacy CentreGoogle offers a range of advertising services through our AdWords and AdSense programmes to show you the most useful and relevant ads online. These ads appear on Google’s sites and services and on partner websites in the Google content network. Some ads are based primarily on your search queries or on the content of the page that you’re viewing. When providing ads tailored to your interests, we offer useful tools for you to view and manage the information that is being collected and used to serve ads. To protect your privacy, we follow three principles when we serve ads:
The Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information in Google’s products and services, including information provided when using or interacting with our advertising services. In addition, the Privacy Policy for Google ads and the Google content network and the specific privacy notices for Google services describe our privacy practices relating to our advertising services. Google also offers display advertising services through DoubleClick. For more information, see our privacy practices related to DoubleClick advertising products. And to learn more about YouTube’s approach to advertising, see YouTube Advertising and You.
Google uses cookies to improve your online experience, including the display of more relevant ads. Learn more about how Google uses advertising cookies.
Anyone may opt out of the DoubleClick cookie (for AdSense partner sites, DoubleClick ad serving and certain Google services using the DoubleClick cookie) at any time by clicking the button above. Google also offers a number of options to permanently save your opt-out settings in your browser. In addition, Google allows third-party advertisers to serve ads on the Google content network. Using a tool created by the Network Advertising Initiative, you can opt out of several third-party ad servers’ and networks’ cookies simultaneously. (Google also uses cookies for Google Analytics and conversion tracking. Read more about this in our FAQ below.) Google is a signatory to the Internet Advertising Bureau United Kingdom Good Practice Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising.
We make protecting privacy a priority by being clear about the information that we collect and how we will use the information to display relevant ads, and by offering choices to consumers about the information to be shared with us. We also make it easy for you to view, manage and opt out of interest-based ads displayed on AdSense partner sites and certain Google sites. We will not collect, sell or share personally identifying information from ad serving cookies without your explicit consent.
We serve ads on our own websites through our AdWords programme, as well as using AdSense technology on certain services. We also serve ads on partner websites through our AdSense programme. We use a variety of methods to deliver ads that are relevant.
For our AdWords programme, we serve ads based on the subject matter of your search. For example, if you search for “golf” on our search engine, you’ll see golf-related ads. We also make ads geographically relevant, which we do with the help of IP addresses. If you’re in London searching for cab companies, you probably want ads for London-based, not Boston-based cabs.
For our AdSense programme, we serve ads based on the content of the site that you view. For example, if you visit a gardening site, ads on that site may be related to gardening. In addition, we may serve ads based on your interests. As you browse websites that have partnered with us or Google sites using the DoubleClick cookie, such as YouTube, Google may place the DoubleClick cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages visited or content that you viewed. Based on this information, Google associates your browser with relevant interest categories and uses these categories to display interest-based ads. For example, if you frequently visit travel websites, Google may display more ads that are related to travel. In addition to ads based on interest categories, Google also allows advertisers to display you ads based on your previous interactions with them, such as visits to their websites. Advertisers may not use this technology to identify you personally, but it enables advertisers to deliver much more relevant ads to groups of users who previously interacted with them. Some of the sites and services (such as social networking sites) that use our AdSense programme may also use information that doesn’t identify you personally, such as demographic data, to provide relevant advertising. Google will not associate sensitive interest categories with your browser (such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health or sensitive financial categories) and will not use such categories when displaying you interest-based ads.
Using the DoubleClick cookie, YouTube also displays interest-based advertising to display relevant ads on its site. The interest categories are determined by your visits to websites that use our AdSense programme, as well as by the videos that you prefer to watch or actions that you take (such as uploading) on YouTube. The DoubleClick cookie associates your browser with relevant interest categories and uses these categories to display interest-based ads. We do not combine information from your YouTube account or Google account with the cookie data used to serve interest-based advertising. To learn more, see YouTube Advertising and You.
Interest categories are based on visits to our AdSense partner sites and Google sites that use the DoubleClick cookie, including YouTube. Using the Ads Preferences Manager, you can edit your ads preferences by adding interest categories that are relevant to you. You can also remove any interest categories that don’t apply and Google will no longer use them for displaying you interest-based ads. When you edit your ads preferences, your new settings may not take immediate effect, since it takes time for the change to be processed in our systems.
If you prefer not to receive interest-based advertising, you can always click the “Opt out” button at the top of this page or click the “Opt out” button on the Ads Preferences Manager. Google also offers a number of options to permanently save your opt-out settings in your browser. Once you opt out, Google will not collect interest-category information and you will not receive interest-based ads. You will still see the same number of ads as before and Google may still display relevant ads based on the content of a web page or other non-personal information. For example, if you visit a gardening site, Google can determine the content of the site and may automatically display ads that are related to gardening to all visitors without using a cookie. In addition, whenever we serve an ad on Google search or on the sites of our AdSense for search partners, the ads which are displayed may still be based on the search terms that you enter.
A cookie is a snippet of text that is sent from a website’s servers and stored on a web browser. Like most websites and search engines, Google uses cookies in order to provide a better user experience and to serve relevant ads.
Google uses the DoubleClick cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to serve more relevant ads across the web and limit the number of times that a given ad is displayed to you. When you visit a website, view an ad or click an ad supported by Google’s advertising services, we may set a cookie on your browser. This advertising cookie will appear in your browser as coming from the domain “doubleclick.net”.
When the cookie is set on your browser, it allows Google to gather information about your browser’s interaction with a given ad. This information is recorded in a log that looks something like this:
time: 06/Aug/2008 12:01:32 ad_placement_id: 105 ad_id: 1003 userid: 0000000000000001 client_ip: 123.45.67.89 referral_url: "http://youtube.com/categories"
The “time” field reflects the time that the ad was displayed. The “ad placement id” and “ad id” identify the advertising campaign and the specific ad served. The “userid” is the displayed ad cookie that identifies the browser. The “client IP” reflects the user’s Internet Protocol (IP) address. A “referral URL” indicates the URL of the page where the ad was served. Our logs also record whether a user’s browser clicks or interacts with an ad.
This information helps Google deliver ads that are relevant to your interests, control the number of times that you see a given ad and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. Anyone who prefers not to see ads with this level of relevance can opt out of advertising cookies. This opt-out will be specific only to the browser that you are using when you click the “Opt out” button.
Google Analytics is Google’s free web analytics tool that helps website owners understand how their visitors engage with their website. Google Analytics collects information anonymously, and much like examining footprints in sand, it reports website trends without identifying individual visitors. Analytics uses its own cookie to track visitor interactions. The cookie is used to store information, such as the time at which the current visit occurred, whether the visitor has been to the site before and what site referred the visitor to the web page. Google Analytics customers can view a variety of reports about how visitors interact with their website so that they can improve their website and how people find it. A different cookie is used for each website and visitors are not tracked across multiple sites. Analytics requires that all websites that use it must update their privacy policy to include a notice that fully discloses the use of Analytics. To disable this type of cookie, some browsers will indicate when a cookie is being sent and allow you to decline cookies on a case-by-case basis.
Google uses cookies to help businesses that buy ads from Google determine the number of people who click their ads that end up purchasing their products. The conversion tracking cookie is set on your browser only when you click an ad delivered by Google where the advertiser has opted in to conversion tracking. These cookies expire within 30 days and do not contain information that can identify you personally. If this cookie has not yet expired when you visit certain pages of the advertiser’s website, Google and the advertiser will be able to tell that you clicked the ad and proceeded to that page. Each advertiser gets a different cookie, so no cookie can be tracked across advertiser websites. If you want to disable conversion tracking cookies, you can set your browser to block cookies from the googleadservices.com domain.
Google scans the text of Google Mail messages in order to filter spam and detect viruses. The Google Mail filtering system also scans for keywords in users’ emails which are then used to match and serve ads. The whole process is automated and involves no humans matching ads to Google Mail content.
For additional information about our advertising products and services, have a look at these FAQs: