Google Serves Better Gmail Ads, Still Isn't Reading Your Emails to Do It

Google is always looking for ways to serve better ads, so it can make more money, in the search engine, on YouTube, on other sites even in Gmail. Most people hardly even notice the ads in Gmail, except when they're horribly out of place, but they're there nonetheless. Now Google is making some changes to serve more relevant ads in Gmail, so maybe you'll notice them even less. That's not exactly what Google is aiming for though, it will now look at previous recent emails in your inbox when deciding what ads to show if it can't find any useful ones based on the email you currently have open.

"When you open a message in Gmail, you often see ads related to that email. Let's say you're looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago," Steve Crossan, Gmail product manager writes.

"But sometimes, there aren't any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you'll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let's say you're looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren't any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead," he explains.

This makes sense on some level, ads relevant to your emails, even if it's not the one you are currently viewing, are better than just random ones. In theory, this should mean less out of place ads, making the whole experience more useful.

In practice though, this probably has less to do with not finding any useful ads and more to do with serving the ones which pay better for Google. In the example above, next to an email about a birthday party, Google could serve ads from various local businesses, caterers, gift shops, clowns in between circus gigs, you name it. But an ad for an airline company is going to be worth a lot more for Google than anything local entertainers can drum up. In any case, Google wants to reassure its users once again that no one is reading their emails to serve the ads, nothing gets through to the advertisers and that the entire process is automated. And just to make it extra clear, it has updated the help page related to the topic and even made a video explaining the changes.