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Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

adwords.blogspot.com

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Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#51

Post by Natsu »

panarky wrote: post #11
baconner wrote: post #3

Get ready for ads to start addressing you directly by name and doing other like things to get your attention. Google isn't usually _too_ overt about these sort of things but the less savory ad networks could get really unpleasant. "Hey there George Thompson, click to see one weird trick to hide your arrest records from your wife Mary"

You are prohibited from creating ad content which implies knowledge of personally identifiable information or sensitive information about your customers ... Sensitive information about your customers can’t be used in Customer Match campaigns or ads. Additionally, you can't use data from your Customer Match campaigns to identify sensitive information about your customers. Sensitive information includes: Interest or pa…

I just wonder how quickly Google will be able to nix those ads when people do this anyway and how creeped out people will get.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#52

Post by eli »

vomitcuddle wrote: post #49
magicalist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally won't be running these, but I'm curious if others are really comfortable with the idea of uploading their customer lists to Google (or FB or anyone else for that matter) in plaintext vs. going through a neutral middle-man that lets you just provide hashed values to get a match. according to the linked [1] you only upload hashes of email addresses. [1] https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125

nothing stopping them from storing precomputed hashes for every registered gmail address and using them as a lookup table

If you don't want Google matching your customer list to individual gmail accounts for targeting, then this service isn't for you. That's kinda the whole point.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#53

Post by eli »

calbear81 wrote: post #8

This is already an option on Facebook called "Custom Audience" so I'm not surprised that Google is releasing this as well. Regarding the privacy implications, almost every major e-commerce site already uses third party marketing systems, oftentimes with e-mail address, so this is pretty much the same. They're not selling the data to a 3rd party since they are a 1st party using a 3rd party tool.

Twitter too.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#54

Post by on_ »

kristofferR wrote: post #36
swalsh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is kind of half pointless. I see ad's all day long that are half relevant to me. I rarely click on them. Just because they start screaming my name doesn't make me more likely to click. The most effective advertisements aren't ads. Most of the time I use a product or service it's because I saw someone on here or someone I know talking about it.

> Just because they start screaming my name doesn't make me more likely to click. I suspect you are a relatively rare border case, then.

This came up a few days ago on HN. There is brand awareness as well as direct sales. So if you see a Heroku advert, then see an article on HN a few days later about it, when looking for quick app deployment you may start at heroku instead of engineyard.

Also, everyone underestimates how much advertising works. People often downplay advertising and beleive it affects others much more than themselves. While for low hanging fruit like MacKeeper, a shit-tier virus-spam-app that constantly is displayed via popups, targeted ads based on your preferences are subtle and difficult to weigh.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#55

Post by ergothus »

baconner wrote: post #3

Get ready for ads to start addressing you directly by name and doing other like things to get your attention. Google isn't usually _too_ overt about these sort of things but the less savory ad networks could get really unpleasant. "Hey there George Thompson, click to see one weird trick to hide your arrest records from your wife Mary"

Far more sinister would be "Your wife Mary has an arrest record, click to see it!" (but of course, she doesn't - they just want the click, and get to imply validity by means of knowing other personal details).

As you said, I doubt Google would try/permit this, but this will certainly come through.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#56

Post by shostack »

magicalist wrote: post #47
shostack wrote: post #43

This is nothing new as FB has had Custom Audiences available for a while now, and you could also do this with 3rd party audience lists via cookie onboarding services like LiveRamp, etc. What I'm wondering here is if Google will provide any way to upload this info to them anonymously similar to how Liveramp does it. I personally won't be running these, but I'm curious if others are really comfortable with the idea of…

> I personally won't be running these, but I'm curious if others are really comfortable with the idea of uploading their customer lists to Google (or FB or anyone else for that matter) in plaintext vs. going through a neutral middle-man that lets you just provide hashed values to get a match. according to the linked [1] you only upload hashes of email addresses. [1] https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125

Wow, clearly I haven't had enough caffeine yet to even read the support page, thanks for the kind reminder ;)

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#57

Post by eli »

NearAP wrote: post #28

The article gave gave an example of 'Rewards program' of a company. Using that example, most rewards program give you the option not to receive 'promotional emails' from them. Does this mean such companies will also not upload to Google, the email of someone who has opted not to receive promotional emails? If the companies don't do that, how can a user 'opt out' of not receiving such targeted advertising?

This isn't about sending emails. It's about Google AdWords display ads. I think it's technically possible to "hide" individual advertisers, but the short answer is: no, the company is under no obligation to stop showing web ads to people who previously said they don't want emails.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#58

Post by on_ »

josteink wrote: post #32
ljk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also don't log in to Chrome

Don't use Chrome.

What browser do you use? If there was a sane option, I would use it but Firefox really consumes resources even putting effort in to optimizing my settings. Using the tor browser or something is just not practical for everyday use. You can either give your data to microsoft, apple or google (if you haven't already) or use FF.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#59

Post by mthoms »

What's the implication here for sites wishing to monetize by selling (hashed) email lists of their users? Take Reddit for example, it could make a lot of money by selling the (hashed) list of users subscribed to /r/travel (or almost any other sub). Suddenly all those users with adblock who won't fork out for subscriptions would be generating income.

I know most TOS's say they don't share email addresses, but sites could theoretically specify that a hash of an email address be allowed.

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