The Privacy & messaging tool in AdSense provides a variety of options for enabling personalized and non-personalized ads. This article details the differences between the two types of ads. Learn more about ads personalization settings in Google's publisher ad tags.
Personalized ads
Personalized advertising (formerly known as interest-based advertising) is a powerful tool that improves advertising relevance for users and increases ROI for advertisers. In all our publisher products, we make inferences about a user’s interests based on the sites they visit or the apps they use. This allows advertisers to target their campaigns according to these interests, providing an improved experience for users and advertisers alike. Learn more about our advertiser policies for personalized ads.
Google considers ads to be personalized when they are based on previously collected or historical data to determine or influence ad selection, including activity like previous search queries, visits to sites or apps, location, or demographic information. For example, this could include: demographic targeting, interest category targeting, remarketing, targeting Customer Match lists, and targeting audience lists uploaded in Display & Video 360 or Campaign Manager 360.
Non-personalized ads (NPA)
Non-personalized ads are not based on a user’s past behavior. Instead, they use contextual information, including coarse geo-targeting (such as city-level) based on current location, content on the current site or app, or current query terms. When serving non-personalized ads, Google AdSense disallows all data used for personalization, including demographic targeting and user list targeting.
Although non-personalized ads don’t use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for ad targeting, they do still use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for frequency capping and aggregated ad reporting.
You must obtain consent to use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for those purposes where legally required, such as in the UK, Switzerland, and certain countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) per the ePrivacy Directive. Learn more about Publisher integration with the IAB TCF v2.2.
