Who likes irrelevant ads ? If you have EVER observed ads in Gmail, you could have seen some irrelevant ads and that might have made you install some adons to remove ads from your GMail or you might have started developing a sense of ad blindness.
But Google Gmail team is taking more efforts to make those ads as relevant and useful as possible.
With the introduction of priority mail, Gmail algorithms can now track what’s important mail for you and what’s not. And they also know what goes to your inbox, and what label you apply to your mails and what kind of messages are marked as SPAM.
GMail intelligently using these signals to track your interests, tastes and will start showing lesser and more relevant ads which will make sense to you.
And you may have to overcome your ad blindness, as these ads may start giving you coupon codes / discount codes from your local store for the things which you are interested in.
Ex: If you’re exchanging mails with your friends about gifting flowers for your girl friend for her upcoming birthday, then GMail algorithm may track your interest and may start showing discount coupon for ordering fresh flowers from your local flower store, for your girl friend.
Some years back I had seen people complaining about these ads reading the personal emails! lol [But back then, it was a serious issue]. So here is Google’s small disclaimer:
As always, ads in Gmail are fully automated-no humans read your messages- and no messages or personally identifiable information about you is shared with advertisers.
And as always, you can enable or disable this feature by visiting your GMail accounts Settings -> General Tab -> Importance signals for ads.
This feature is also enabled in your Google Apps email accounts. It’s interesting to see that, this feature is enabled by default, once it is rolled over to your account.