If you’re new to the Adsense system you may have some confusion about what kinds of ads are displayed on your websites or in other locations that you use the program. Traditionally, all Adsense ads were generated based on the content of your specific web page. Therefore if you had a page about football merchandise, ads relating to football merchandise would generally be shown.

However, Adsense has now undergone a change to work with interest based advertising. In this system, the ads that end up getting displayed on your website may have nothing at all to do with you page’s content. Instead, the ads will be based on stored information about the specific website visitor. If they have a history of searching for leather couches, then even on your football merchandise site they will still be seeing ads for leather couches. Along the same lines, somebody spending his or her time searching for new Dell laptops would see ads relevant to that.

The purpose behind interest based advertising, as opposed to contextual based advertising, is that you are supposed to be targeting all of your individual users and speaking directly to what they have already been proven to be interested in. Theoretically this would drive up the amount of ads that get clicked and you would earn money. However, there are major problems with this system as well, particularly for those with niche websites.

Many people develop websites based around a set of keywords that has a very high payout for clicks. The whole purpose of the site is to bring people into the site to get them to click those specific ads. Along the same line, a person running an e-Commerce or comparison type shop might be displaying various options for where a person could buy “football merchandise” to go back to that example. Therefore, he would want to maintain the contextual advertising, regardless of the supposed benefits of interest based advertising.

If this is the case, when using Google Adsense you have to manually opt-out of their new interest based advertising system. If you manually opt out in your account settings tab, you’ll be able to continue showing contextual advertisements that revolve around your site’s content directly. If you fail to do so, then you will be showing interest based advertisements by default.

Regardless of whether or not you want to use interest based advertising, you’ll still have to update your site’s Privacy Policy to include mention of the Google DART cookie which makes the interest based advertising possible. Don’t forget to take this step, whichever direction you want to go in, so that you stay in the good grace’s of the Adsense system. Keep in mind that both interest based and contextual based advertising have benefits and can work in different situations for different people.

An all purpose blog with Adsense ads being displayed won’t have the need to use contextual based advertising in most cases. In this situation, capitalizing on visitor browing history may provide a huge revenue boost. However, those with niche blogs or sites will clearly want to opt-out and retain their contextual advertisements.