The curious case of Infusion Pumps & Human Resource Jobs

For some reason, Google is extremely keen on selling me pumps; and not just any ordinary pump, they want me to buy syringe pumps, infusion pumps, grinder pumps and dosing pumps. Honestly, I’ve very little idea about what to do with those.

I’m of course talking about the Ads Google shows me; not in the search result page, but in Gmail. Google uses its Adsense product’s “analytical ability” to serve “contextual ads” in Gmail pages. Note the use of quotes in my previous sentence; because after observing these ads for a few days I’m seriously beginning to doubt Google’s ability to analyze the context of the page.

To be fair to Google, it’s extremely difficult to separate noise from the actual content in an email message. In fact this is one of the three main reasons why most of the other email service providers have decided not to show contextual ads along with email messages (the other two being the misplaced privacy concerns and the lack of commercial intent of users while reading an email). My initial thought was that Google was showing me some random ads (“run-of-network” ads, as they are affectionately called) in messages for which it can’t extract the context.

Unfortunately, a few hours of careful observation revealed that this is not the case. Google shows me these ads for pumps whenever I open a particular mail. It’s a forward from one of my friends, with the subject “When your colleague is on leave”. It has an attachment showing images of the pranks you can play on your colleagues. The mail is not a great one for people who hate practical jokes, but it has its positive sides; viz. it doesn’t have any reference to pumps. But Google apparently thinks that the best way to spend your time, when your colleague is on leave, is to go on a shopping frenzy and buy as many pumps as you can. Similarly, whenever I open a mail that has pictures of my nephew, Google quickly interprets that I’m a suitable candidate for “Human Resource Jobs”. I’m clearly missing the link here, but definitely these are not random ads. These ads are tied to the email message by some weird logic that Adsense uses.

As a matter of fact, even in the cases where the context of the mail is pretty obvious, Google does an extremely poor job of showing relevant Ads. Just because a friend is asking me the contact number of someone in Andhra Bank, doesn’t imply that I’m interested in ICICI Bank Jobs or, say, the weather forecast in Hyderabad. Not sure what kind of CTR Google gets for these Ads, but my guess is it would be very negligible.

So what should Google do to monetize Gmail? They, of course, insist on projecting a user friendly image (they should do something about the loading time of Gmail though), which means the usual banners ads are ruled out. This is where you wonder, when Google is actually going to aggregate all the data it has been collecting about the users across various applications. I had an Orkut account (note the past tense). So they know where I live, which should tell them that I would be more interested in Bangalore weather. They have all my search trends, my web history; they know what kind of blogs I’ve subscribed to in my Google reader. So why insist on showing contextual ads in Gmail that doesn’t make any sense.

When exactly are they going to use all this information to deliver highly targeted ads to me? If they want to start serving such ads, Gmail (or Orkut) should be an ideal place to start. That’s because a user considers his Inbox or his profile page as his own little private space and most probably wouldn’t mind seeing individually targeted ads there. At least these ads would be more relevant to me than the ones about pumps.