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How Google Lets Ad Marketers Like Me Track Your Kids

Google provides marketers with more than 1,000 flavors of your browsing behavior to target with ads

Patrick Berlinquette
OneZero
20 min readJul 22, 2020

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Image: Colin Anderson Productions pty ltd/Getty Images

If you’ve been following this series so far, you know that Google tracks the websites you visit. Then it passes the data to marketers like me so we can target you with ads based on where you’ve been on the internet.

Google lets us know whether you’ve browsed sites about certain topics recently or over a longer time frame. This is important, as it sculpts our strategy to “convert you” — that is, get you to buy a product or service with our ad.

For example, I would want to serve you a Porsche ad if you’ve been browsing prices of new Porsches for weeks. But if you just visited Porsche.com for the first time two days ago? Not so much.

The ability for marketers to target you based on your browsing history is not new. It’s been around for years. But Google’s technology has become more sophisticated. Now, when you use Google, it’s not just your own privacy you’re giving up, but also the privacy of those around you.

We make inferences from your browsing habits about more than you. We also know the interests of the people living in your house, including your children.

Google provides us an ad-targetable data bucket of parents in each age group: infants (0–1 year old), toddlers (1–3), preschoolers (4–5), grade-schoolers (6–12), and teens (13–17).

But wait. Didn’t Google get in trouble for giving marketers the ability to target kids with ads? And weren’t they forced to put a stop to that? Yes.

But Google only had to stop marketers from targeting kids with ads on YouTube. Marketers are still allowed to serve ads to kids on websites they visit and in the apps they use. Therefore, marketers can see the websites that kids visit and the apps they use.

Google does not hand over kids’ targetable browsing histories or app usage. Rather, as I mentioned, they give us the data buckets of parents of kids of different age groups.

But it amounts to the same thing when:

  1. Younger kids use their parents’ phones and tablets.
  2. Google allows us to combine or exclude any browsing history with any other to home in on your precise interests. For example, an ad can be targeted only to single dads who are 35 years old, and who play action role-playing games on PlayStation 4, and who work at a small construction company, and who are in the market for a used Subaru, and who are looking for a job in IT, and who didn’t finish high school, but who don’t make less than $35,000 per year. With this ability, we can just as easily serve ads to dads who have toddlers and overlap that targeting with, say, mobile app games and kids’ show websites — and therefore be able to see the games your kids play and the shows they like, along with their physical location, and serve ads to them as they use your device to play those games and watch those shows.

Here’s more of what Google, and therefore marketers, currently know about what’s going on within your home because of the sites you frequent:

  • We know whether you’re about to get (or recently got) a new pet; whether you’re about to retire, or just retired; whether or not any home renovation projects are in the works; whether you’re in the process of moving, or moving soon; new appliances, new furniture, etc.; whether you’re single or married (getting married soon, or recently married); whether you rent or own; whether you’re looking for a job; and your household income.

Also:

  • Whether you’ve just started a business, or plan to.
  • Whether you’ve just graduated, or plan to.
  • Whether you’ve just started a new job, or plan to.

It used to be that if you browsed a site about a topic that marketers didn’t have a corresponding data bucket for — because Google didn’t provide it to us — then we would not be able to serve you ads based on your browsing history.

But recently, Google gave us the ability to create our own browsing history buckets. We can, for example, create two browsing histories: one for “green karate belts” and one for “divorce lawyers.” Google will then allow us to target all people who browse websites about green karate belts and divorce lawyers with ads.

If we go a step further and combine the bucket we’ve created out of thin air with the Google-created “grade-schoolers (6–12)” bucket, we can now target folks with a divorce mediation ad featuring, say, a child forgotten at karate class because his parents were busy arguing at home.

The browsing history buckets we create can be fed more than just the topics of the websites you browse; they can also be fed specific URLs you visit. The same “and” and “or” rules of the topics will apply. So, we might show ads only to visitors of nytimes.com and wsj.com and reddit.com who have not visited breitbart.com.

Savvy businesses use the URL-targeting feature to target ads to potential customers who have been to their competitors’ sites. Or on Gmail, where URL targeting transforms, giving businesses the ability to serve you ads in your Gmail inbox — ads that appear right next to emails — based on the email lists you’re subscribed to.

Using the custom bucket from the earlier example, if applied to Gmail, we would show ads only to people who are subscribed to the email lists of nytimes.com and wsj.com and reddit.com and not subscribed to breitbart.com.

Lastly, a brand-new option as of July 2020 lets marketers serve you ads in feeds — as you scroll YouTube, Gmail, and Google’s Discovery app. Here, marketers can target you based on the words you have typed into Google and then searched, in addition to (or excluding) the aforementioned targeting options — including that particular, Google-created, “grade-schoolers (6–12)” audience.

Here’s the list of all your browsing history that Google tracks, as of July 2020. Whether you’re in the market for…

Google
Marketing
Technology
Privacy
Advertising

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Patrick Berlinquette
OneZero

Written by Patrick Berlinquette

4.6K Followers

Founder of a NY search ad agency (like we need another). Finding humor in ad tech’s depravity. Writings @ NY Times.

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