Online advertising watch: Michelle Nunn display ads cropping up

The first display ads by the Michelle Nunn campaign I noticed were actually on GaPundit.com itself. We use Google Ads to sell our inventory, and if you’re targeting Google sites that use terms like “Michelle Nunn” or “Georgia Senate,” you’ve undoubtedly come to the right place. But this kind of targeting can land you in places that might seem counterintuitive – like a blog about Republican politics in Georgia.

If you’re using Google for ad placement, and you wind up on a Republican website, aren’t you wasting ad money? Probably not. Most political advertisers I’ve spoken to prefer “pay-per-click” which means that the ad costs money only if the viewer clicks on it and is taken to your campaign website.

If you look more closely at her display ads, some of them will say in the upper right hand corner “AdChoices,” which means that the placement is tied to the computer’s browsing history as a means of targeting interested viewers. Here’s how that works:

HOW IS INFORMATION ABOUT WEB BROWSING USED FOR THIS TYPE OF ADVERTISING?

When you visit particular Web sites and see particular ads online, information is gathered and stored in your browser with the help of small text files called Web “cookies.” By using this information, advertising services providers can attempt to predict your likely interests and to determine which ads may be most relevant to serve you next.

DOES INTEREST-BASED ADVERTISING USE MY PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Interest-based advertising doesn’t depend on information that may be personally identifiable to you, such as your e-mail address, your phone number, photographs, etc.

Now this illustrates what might seem to some like an ironic ad placement: a Nunn search ad displayed in a WSB-TV story about Republican David Perdue, who announced his campaign the day after Nunn.