Advertising
Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services you use free of charge. We work hard to make sure that ads are safe, unobtrusive and as relevant as possible. For example, you won’t see pop-up ads on Google and we terminate the accounts of hundreds of thousands of publishers and advertisers that violate our policies each year – including ads containing malware, ads for counterfeit goods or those that attempt to misuse your personal information.
How Google uses cookies in advertising
Cookies help to make advertising more effective – and that is what keeps thousands of websites free of charge. Without cookies, it’s harder for an advertiser to reach its audience, or to know how many ads were shown and how many clicks they received.
Many websites, such as news sites and blogs, partner with Google to show ads to their visitors. Working with our partners, we may use cookies for a number of purposes, such as to stop you seeing the same ad over and over again, to detect and stop click fraud, and to show ads that are likely to be more relevant (such as ads based on websites you have visited).
We store a record of the ads we serve in our logs. These server logs typically include your web request, IP address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We store this data for a number of reasons, the most important of which are to improve our services and to maintain the security of our systems. We anonymize this log data by removing part of the IP address (after 9 months) and cookie information (after 18 months).
Our advertising cookies
To help our partners manage their advertising and websites, we offer many products, including AdSense, AdWords, Google Analytics, and a range of DoubleClick-branded services. When you visit a page that uses one of these products, either on one of Google’s sites or one of our partners’, various cookies may be sent to your browser.
These may be set from a few different domains, including google.com, doubleclick.net, invitemedia.com, admeld.com, googlesyndication.com, or googleadservices.com. Some of our advertising products enable our partners to use other services in conjunction with ours (like an ad measurement and reporting service) and these services may send their own cookies to your browser. These cookies will be set from their domains.
See more detail about the types of cookie used by Google and our partners, and how we use them.
How you can control advertising cookies
You can use Ads Settings to manage the Google ads you see.
You can also manage many companies’ cookies used for online advertising at the US-based aboutads.info choices page or the EU-based Your Online Choices.
Finally, you can manage cookies in your web browser.
Other technologies used in advertising
Google’s advertising systems may use other technologies, including Flash and HTML5, for functions like display of interactive ad formats. We may use the IP address, for example, to identify your general location. We may also select advertising based on information about your computer or device, such as your device model, browser type, or sensors in your device like the accelerometer.
Anonymous identifiers on mobile devices
To serve ads in services where cookie technology may not be available (for example, in mobile applications), we may use anonymous identifiers. These perform similar functions to cookies. To control the ads that we serve to apps on your mobile device, you can use our Ads Settings for apps. To change your preferences, or to opt out of interest-based ads, follow the instructions below for your mobile device.
Android
- Open the Google Settings app on your device
- Select Ads
iOS
Some apps on iOS 6 devices use Apple’s Advertising Identifier; to learn more about limiting ad tracking using this identifier, visit the Settings menu on your iOS 6 device. Legacy apps on your iOS 6 device, as well as apps on devices running older versions of iOS, may use a different device identifier. To opt out for these apps:
- Open the Google Search app on your device
- Press the Settings icon
- Go to Ads Preferences