Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services that 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 ads that attempt to misuse your personal information.
Google advertising services are experimenting with new ways of supporting the delivery and measurement of digital advertising in ways that better protect people’s privacy online via the Privacy Sandbox initiative on Chrome and Android. Users with the relevant Privacy Sandbox settings enabled in Chrome or Android may see relevant ads from Google’s advertising services based on Topics or Protected audience data stored on their browser or mobile device. Google’s advertising services may also measure ad performance using Attribution reporting data stored on their browser or mobile device. More information on the Privacy Sandbox.
How Google uses cookies in advertising
Cookies help to make advertising more effective. 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 from 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 that you have visited).
We store a record of the ads that 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 anonymise 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 or see an ad that uses one of these products, either on Google services or on other sites and apps, various cookies may be sent to your browser.
These may be set from a few different domains, including google.com, doubleclick.net, googlesyndication.com, googleadservices.com or the domain of our partners’ sites. 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 cookies used by Google and our partners and how we use them.
How you can control advertising cookies
You can use Ad Settings to manage the Google ads that you see and turn off personalised ads. Even if you turn off personalised ads, you may still see ads based on factors such as your general location derived from your IP address, your browser type and your search terms.
You can also manage many companies’ cookies used for online advertising via the consumer choice tools created under self-regulation programmes in many countries, such as the US-based aboutads.info choices page or the EU-based Your Online Choices.
Finally, you can manage cookies in your web browser.
