Google puts new limitations on personalized ads relating to consumer finance

Google will begin enforcing its updated personalized ads policy tomorrow, Wednesday, February 28.

• The updated policy, which applies to the US and Canada, prohibits advertisers from targeting “offers relating to credit or products or services related to credit lending, banking products, and services, or certain financial planning and management services” to audiences based on “gender, age, parental status, marital status, or ZIP code,” per Google.
• This includes credit cards and loans, including home loans, car loans, appliance loans, short-term loans, banking and checking accounts, and debt management products.
• Any accounts in violation will be issued a warning at least seven days prior to any suspension of their account.

What it means for financial marketers: Targeting consumers is going to get a little more difficult.

“If a bank is only able to offer a particular product or rate in a specific geographic area, and they were previously using a ZIP code to do it, they will now need to switch to another form of geotargeting to cover the proper area,” said Timothy Jensen, senior search engine marketing specialist at M&T Bank.

But it won’t be impossible. For example, radius targeting beyond three kilometers is still allowed, as well as other criteria such as city/county/state, according to Google, so other geographic options are still available.

In addition, advertisers promoting products and services that fall within this expanded category will no longer be able to use advertiser-curated audience targeting features like Customer Match, their own data segments, similar segments, custom segments, and Gmail Ads, per Google.

However, advertisers will still be able to use predefined Google audiences as they are explicitly built to not target sensitive interest categories.

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