A quick twitter exchange this morning between me and Steve Peters prompted me to take a quick poll to see just how off-base Google is with its attempt to profile online users not logged in to Google. The anecdotal responses of some twitter friends indicated not well at all. Ages were often wrong, as were sexes – sometimes both!
This means advertisers with Google are probably throwing money at the wrong target demographic. The result: irrelevant ads for you, wasted dollars for the advertiser. The only can’t-lose person in this mix is Google.
Curious to know if this is as bad as I think it is, I’m asking you to take literally 3 minutes or less to:
1) Visit Google to see what it thinks your age and sex are
2) Let us know via the poll below how accurate Google is
Please share this on twitter with the hashtag #GoogleDoesNotKnowMe!
And while you’re at Google’s page, you can also opt out of their cookie-enabled marketing system.
NOTE: Google stores a cookie on your machine to help it determine your profile (if you are logged into Google, it already knows who you are). Ideally, log OUT of Google before visiting the site above. And since the cookie is probably different across browsers, you might get different responses depending on which browser you use.