Perhaps each and every one of us hates ads, except for those who benefit from them. Ads are pretty much everywhere over the internet these days, and even YouTube is making efforts to impose its ads for those numerous users who don’t want to go Premium. But why waste any time complaining online about the horrors of ads when you can simply customize them to match your interests?
There are ways to make those ads more friendly and relevant to you. If blocking them is not possible, why not try to benefit from them a bit? That seems to be what the guys behind the adsettings.google.com platform had in mind when they decided to implement such a possibility. The website will give you personalized ads based on your interest, demographic data, and search history.
How to change your ad experience on Google
Google offers us a series of powerful tools to control what ads we see, not only adsettings.google.com.
By accessing adsettings.google.com and tweaking the settings a bit, you can simply modify the way you see ads on Google. Here are the very simple steps you need to take:
- Head over to the Google homepage
- Select the ‘Settings’ icon, which appears in the top right-hand corner of the display.
- From the drop-down menu that appears, select the ‘Ad settings’ option.
- The next page that appears will give you the chance to customize your ad preferences based on your own interests.
However, you won’t have complete control over the ads you see, as some general characteristics will still be there, such as the device type and location.
Customizing the ads
The process of properly customizing those ads is also pretty simple. First and foremost, you need to head over to adsettings.google.com by using your browser. You also obviously need to be logged into your Google account. If you don’t have one, it takes only about a minute to make it.
For the second step, you will have to review your interests. A list of interests and categories that you might be interested in will appear to you. The list is based on your own online activity and the information Google has gathered about you.
The third step is to customize the ad settings. Feel free to click the “turn off” button each time you see an interest that you’re not interested in, an action that will tell Google not to show you ads related to that specific interest. On the other hand, you will have to add your true interests by searching for specific topics. Therefore, Google will start showing you ads based on those topics.
As a fourth step, you will have to update your personal information. If the personal information is not correct, feel free to update it by entering your age, gender, and so on. This information will also be used by Google to customize your ad experience.
If you’ve done all the above steps, it’s time to control ad personalization. This means that under ‘ad personalization,’ you will have to toggle the switch to turn the option on or off. Once you turn it off, Google won’t use your online activity for personalizing the ads you see.
It’s also possible to opt out of ad personalization for Google services and the web. This means that you’ll have to deal with less personalized ads.
Finally, you will have to review the ad experience. Google will give you a chance to know what ads you’ve interacted with recently and provide options to give feedback on the ads that are irrelevant to you.
What do you think? Are you able to tolerate ads if they act more in your favor?
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.
