Google recently announced it will allow personalized ads for social casinos, though the search giant will keep its ban on targeted ads in place for sweeps casinos and any other casino products offering cash prizes. Google will roll out its new policy for social casino ads in the first week of December.
What that means for players is that you can expect to start seeing a lot more ads for social casinos once Google knows you’re interested in them.
How personalized ads will impact your online experience
In principle, personalized ads make your online experience better by providing you with advertisements that are relevant to your life. Here’s how Google explains it:
Personalized advertising is a powerful tool that improves advertising relevance for users and increases ROI for advertisers. Because it works by employing online user data to target users with more relevant advertising content, it can provide an improved experience for users and advertisers alike.
However, personalized ads can also begin to feel repetitive. If you’ve had the experience of being advertised the exact item you were just looking at on Amazon, that’s personalized advertising at work.
That being said, Google has rules for personalized ads. For example, ads cannot:
- Target minors
- Exploit your personal hardships
- Target you based on your beliefs or identity
For the longest time, Google would not allow targeted ads for online casinos, whether real-money, sweeps, or social.
However, this new policy removes social casinos from the exclusion list. So, starting in December, it’s likely that you’ll see more and more social casino ads appear on pages you browse.
But the new rules come with a caveat. That is that sweepstakes casinos are not included in Google’s definition of “social casino”.
Why sweepstakes online casinos are excluded
Google notes that any gambling sites that offer prizes of value such as merchandise or money are classified in its “sensitive interest” category. That’s why you don’t often see targeted ads for, say, Chumba Casino or Lucklyland Slots.
Generally speaking, Google has its sensitive interest categories to protect users.
“We recognize that certain interests are sensitive and that targeting based on them could negatively impact user experience,” Google notes in its rules for personalized advertising.
In simple terms, they don’t want companies targeting ads toward real-money gamblers. That could have a negative impact on those with gambling addictions.
Social casino still should be played responsibly
Though Google’s personalized ads policies differentiate between social casinos and sweeps casinos because of the prizes-of-value aspect, that doesn’t mean social casinos shouldn’t be played responsibly.
A 2018 Canadian study of more than 10,000 students in grades 9-12 found that social casino games (SGC) can contribute to problem gambling rates.
“Findings from the study revealed that, across all types of SCGs, a larger proportion of SCG players than non-players were classified as exhibiting signs of problem gambling,” the study noted. “In contrast, adolescents who did not report playing SCGs in the past three months were predominantly classified as not being problem gamblers. These results are supportive of existing studies of adults and adolescents, in which social casino gaming has exhibited associations with problem gambling tendencies.”
Visit Gaming Today’s Responsible Gaming page for more information and tips on how to gamble responsibly.
