EU user consent controls in AdMob provide several options for enabling personalised and non-personalised ads (enabled via the Google Mobile Ads SDK). This article details the differences between these two types of ads. Learn more about ads personalisation settings in Google's publisher ad tags
Personalised ads
Personalised advertising (formerly known as interest-based advertising) is a powerful tool that improves advertising relevance for users and increases ROI for advertisers. In all our publisher products, we make inferences about a user’s interests based on the sites that they visit or the apps that they use. This allows advertisers to target their campaigns according to these interests, providing an improved experience for users and advertisers alike. Learn more about our advertiser policies for personalised ads.
Google considers ads to be personalised when they're based on previously collected or historical data to determine or influence ad selection, including a user's previous search queries, activity, visits to sites or apps, demographic information or location. Specifically, this would include, for example: demographic targeting, interest category targeting, remarketing, targeting Customer Match lists and targeting audience lists uploaded in DoubleClick Bid Manager or Campaign Manager 360.
Non-personalised ads (NPA)
Non-personalised ads are ads that aren't based on a user’s past behaviour. They're targeted using contextual information, including coarse (such as city-level) geo-targeting based on current location and content on the current site or app or current query terms. Google disallows all personalised targeting, including demographic targeting and user list targeting.
Although non-personalised ads don’t use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for ad targeting, they do still use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting and to combat fraud and abuse. Therefore, you must obtain consent to use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for those purposes where legally required, such as in certain countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) per the ePrivacy Directive.