Adverts On Answerbank

[Jordyboy9]

I know that answerbank depends on advertising but surely the adverts should be universal if that’s the right word,I clicked on to one as it was a good deal for a gas cooker better than John Lewis or curry’s only to find they don’t deliver to Scotland or Wales ,and before anyone says I voted to stay

[Guilbert53]

Answerbank don't choose the adverts to show.

Basically they design the web site and leave "spaces" that are filled by the adverts (which are actually chosen by Google or similar companies)

When I look at AB I probably get totally different adverts to you, in fact each person looking at AB probably gets their own unique set of adverts.

The type of adverts you get may be based on all sorts of things - what web pages you have been looking at (for cookers, TVs, cameras, holidays etc), also what you may have searched on recently (cricket scores, horse racing results, hotel prices), even what you have been putting in your emails (such as "I have been looking for a holiday in Italy").

All these things can affect what adverts you see.

Also note that while web sites can guess where you live (which area) based on your broadband, they don't know exactly, so it is hard to place adverts for particular parts of the country.

So as you can see, what adverts you get is quite a complex business.

[Buenchico]

The system which supplies AB's adverts doesn't know for certain where you're based, JB9. If you do lots of web searches for, say, restaurants in Edinburgh, you might then find that you do get more ads aimed at people in Scotland than others here do. (Equally though, because I've been doing lots of web searches for things to do in Somerset, I might get loads of ads for things in the West Country - even though I actually live in East Anglia).

Further, any 'regionalisation' of adverts depends upon the advertisers themselves tagging their ads so that they only appear in relevant parts of the UK (or relevant parts of the world, as appropriate).

If the advertisers of the gas cooker didn't append the relevant tags to their ads they could end up being shown to 1ozzy, Iminoz and Seekerz (all of whom are in Australia) as well as to you in Scotland. (Equally, ads occasionally appear to UK members of AB for services which are only available in the USA. Again it's because the advertisers haven't appended regional tags to their content).