Users Can Now Mute Repetitive Remarketing Ads

With the latest update in the Google ads settings, users now have the ability to mute ads that they have already seen too many times. This new setting would generally apply to remarketing ads.

Remarketing ads are those that advertisers who after they tag your visit to your website. Once you show interest in a product, advertisers retarget you and the remarketing ads follow you across the web. For example, you visit a website, browse a pair of shoes but don’t buy it. Then you log in to your Facebook and you see an ad for the same pair of shoes. That’s known as retargeting or remarketing.

Google is referring to these ads as “reminder” ads.

If you now go to Google ad settings, you will see a new section titled as “Your reminder ads”. In this section, you can mute “reminder” ads from specific advertisers when they become too repetitive and frustrating. Moreover, you can also see all the advertisers/companies/websites that are currently retargeting you.

Here is a screenshot that shows everything.

There is one important thing to note here, though.

Once you mute an advertiser, it is not a single ad that will be muted. You will be basically muting everything from that particular advertiser. This ‘muting’ will last for the next 3 months (or 90 days), so it’s not like muting a particular advertiser permanently. It will be a temporary block.

At the moment, these reminder ads will be muted in websites and apps. In the near future, Google is planning to expand this feature to include YouTube, Search, and Gmail.

Furthermore, muting a reminder ad will work across devices. For example, if you mute a reminder ad on your mobile device, it will also be muted across desktop and other devices if you are logged in.

From an online marketing perspective, advertisers will now have to be much more careful when running remarketing ads. They will have to be more considerate of user experience.