Google’s Priority Inbox for Gmail users has been hit or miss. Either too many messages are marked important or it’s spot on. However, Google is taking it one step further by improving how ads are displayed to Gmail users. How is the search engine doing it? Simple: using Priority Inbox. Your ads are about to get a lot more relevant.
According to TechCrunch, the new feature is being rolled out to select users. The new ads will be chosen based on your email habits. Say you and a friend exchange information about an upcoming concert, Google is likely to choose ticket resellers, hotels and night life oriented Ads:
With features like Priority Inbox, we’ve been working hard to help sort through the ‘bacn’ in your messages — the unimportant messages that get in your way. Soon we’re going to try a similar approach to ads: using some of the same signals that help predict which messages are likely to be important to you, Gmail will better predict which ads may be useful to you. For example, if you’ve recently received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, a deal from a local camera store might be interesting. On the other hand if you’ve reported these messages as spam, you probably don’t want to see that deal.
Google used the same system that powers AdWords to display ads by perusing keywords in your mail. Basing ad searches on important mail, Google hopes its new system will display more relevant ads. However, some privacy concerns have been raised as Google takes on a bigger role in personalizing ads. You can lay those fears to rest as a robot only sifts through keywords in priority inbox.
