Google’s latest move into the world of behavioural targeting has been hit with a lot of publicity, but in reality, all they are doing is catching up with the game. Yahoo and Microsoft have been using behavioural targeting functionality based on users search queries and pages browsed for a number of years, and charging a premium for the service. But now Google have stepped into the game and all of a sudden it is big news again.
Obviously anything Google announce is going to be big news, but there isn’t much really to their new service that isn’t available in other portals. They have tried to cover themselves from a privacy perspective by allowing people to select their areas of interest but really, is anyone other than those working in the digital arena going to now where to find these settings? No. In reality the ability to select and deselect interests is a token gesture to the privacy police. And of course they are going to sell it to advertisers as an opt in on interests and charge additional for the targeting options.
There is added complexity with Google due to their adsense network and it not being only their properties they would be targeting you on, but other than this, it is nothing more than Yahoo and MSN have been doing with their display advertising for years. Of course the major benefit of Google is they will have much more data to work with than Yahoo and MSN combined so the targeting should be more accurate and more detailed, but other than that, its just Google catching up in the display advertising game.