Opting-out of AdWords remarketing

Posted by Josh on Thursday, April 5th, 2012.

Google’s remarketing ads are great for advertiser, but they can be annoying for some users. As someone who manages advertising, I’m hyper-aware of what ads are showing. Also my competitive research means that I could be remarketed to constantly for products I have less than zero interest in buying. It turns out that you can opt-out of Google’s remarketing ads by turning off interest-based advertising at https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/. The catch, if you can call it that, is that it shuts off all targeting, not just remarketing. This is fine for me when I want to look at ads in situ, though I do believe that having targeted advertising is better than seeing the completely wrong ads for me.

Interestingly, Google appears to take the “morally high road” of removing all of your historical ad targeting information if you opt-out and then opt-in again.

If we learn of remarketing opt-out methods for other ad networks, we’ll blog about them.