beat the competition 
posted in Annoying Google Ads that Follow Me
I'm not sure how well the updates to Google's privacy policy are helping deliver more relevant ads on their Adsense platform. Case in point: I visited a competitor's site the other day, and since then, many other sites I visit (that have Google Adsense) have this company's ad appearing. Even on top of youtube videos, I see the ad appear. I close it, watch another video, it appears again. This has been going on for four days now (and is still continuing). It's like the ad that never goes away - unwanted and annoying. Just by myself, I must be driving down my competitor's click-through rate! I think it may even have a detrimental affect on the advertiser as the ads start to become associated with negative feelings. I don't run ad blocking plugins but this kind of thing could make me consider it...I think the assumption is that because I visited a site, I must want to go back to the site, and the ad acts as a way for me to navigate back to the site. However, they should surely take into account actions you take - such as closing the ad repeatedly on youtube, and never ever clicking on the ad despite it being delivered to me perhaps over a couple of hundred times over four days across dozens of sites and page views. It would be better to vary the ads I see and show similar ads in the same category (web design), but perhaps that's me being too obvious....
I understand as an Adsense publisher myself that website publishers that run Adsense can choose to deliver such "personalised" ads or not. I noticed the following setting was set on my own Adsense account : "Advertisers are allowed to use their audience information to deliver more relevant ads to my site" - since unchecking that option, my Adsense clicks jumped up around 40% over the last two days - I only did this because of the aforementioned annoying ad that stalks me wherever I go, and I didn't want my own sites to annoy my own visitors.
Update 24th May 2012: same ads still following me wherever I go, even though I've visited enough sites now to somehow get new ads to "follow" my browsing. I guess I could clear cookies on the browser to get rid of this, but I don't know exactly which cookies to delete, and don't want to clear all the cookies stored in the browser. This is kind of like 2 months without Google Ads in bizarre way since I'm so blinded to these ads now. Maybe it's time for AdBlock even though I prefer to support sites that make a living from ads (and I did use to click on these ads from time to time....when they were varied).
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