What are ad preference managers?

Ad preference managers (APMs) are transparency tools that allow users to influence the kinds of advertisements shown to them by different companies.

Users do this by altering some aspects of their interest profiles, which comprise specific data collected about individuals to serve them more effective ads.

Targetted advertising

Whenever users browse the Internet, they are tracked by many companies (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.). This is done through several methods, such as cookies, pixel tracking, and browser fingerprinting. These companies build a list of everything advertising-relevant about a person.

For example, let’s say we visit the Educative.io website.

From this, every company tracks us to know that we are interested in online learning. Hence, we’re more susceptible to education-based advertising, and are likely to see advertisements in the education space.

Using ad preference managers

A sophisticated interest profile would have hundreds, even thousands, of such data points to work with. With this much data, companies can provide much more effective advertising than they would otherwise.

The image above is a snippet of one such interest profile taken from Google’s APM. As we can see, an interest profile is based not only on browsing interests, but also on the demographic inferences of each user.

Through an ad preference manager, we have some control over the data points a company uses to show us ads.

For example, if we don’t want Google to show us advertisements based on “Adventure Games,” we can remove anything related to that from our interest profile.

Conclusion

Companies that have APMs provide different levels of control to the user, and we can use them to customize our ads.