Google Ads Remarketing is a powerful tool that allows you to further enhance your marketing efforts by giving you the ability to reach people who previously visited your website or app. However, using this feature also comes with its specific privacy-related responsibilities.
Under the vast majority of global legislations you must explicitly inform your users of the fact that you gather information for these purposes on your website.
In addition to the legal requirements, Google also expressly requires that you disclose any remarketing activity to your end users.
In Google’s words:
When you use the remarketing feature in your website, you’re required to have the following information in your website’s privacy policy:
- An appropriate description of how you’re using remarketing or similar audiences to advertise online.
- A message about how third-party vendors, including Google, show your ads on sites across the Internet.
- A message about how third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on someone’s past visits to your website.
- Information about how your visitors can opt out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting Google’s Ads Settings. Alternatively, you can point your visitors to opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.
If you want to ensure that you comply with Google’s terms ( and with the law) you’ll need to:
To help advertisers manage cookies for analytics and advertising purposes, Google has introduced Consent Mode, a feature that allows you to avoid prior blocking for Google Analytics and Google Ads (including Google Ads Conversion Tracking and Remarketing).
Generally, the national/regional laws of your base of operations will apply, as well as (in many cases), the laws governing the regions in which your users are based. This can be quite tricky online, as, unless you’re actively blocking some regions, you may need to address requirements across geographical boundaries and legal jurisdictions.
For this reason, it’s always the best idea to handle these activities with the strictest applicable regulations in mind (currently European Law, mainly the GDPR and Cookie Law).
While the exact required contents of a privacy policy will vary depending on the law applicable to you and all your specific processing activities, in general, a compliant privacy policy that’s also valid for Google Ads Remarketing activities should contain:
See our post on the Elements of a Privacy Policy for a more detailed list of basic privacy policy requirements.
The exact required contents of your privacy policy depends heavily on your processing activities, law of reference and may even need to address requirements across geographical boundaries and legal jurisdictions.
You can read more about determining your law of reference here or read our in-depth Legal Overview Guide here.
Because a valid privacy policy must always be up-to-date and specific to your own particular situation, it can be a both legally and technologically difficult to write a compliant policy yourself. Here’s where our Privacy and Cookie Policy Generator comes in very handy: with hundreds of available clauses, our privacy policies contain all elements commonly required across many regions and third-party services (including Google products), while applying the strictest standards by default – giving you the option to fully customize as needed.
Our policies are created by lawyers, monitored by our lawyers and hosted on our servers to ensure that they are always up-to-date with the latest legal changes and third-party requirements.
Analytics services use various techniques to track user behavior and must be mentioned in the privacy policy. Add “Google Ads conversion tracking” clause if you use this analytics service. Conversion tracking services are useful for understanding the impact of your advertising spend on a given network.
For more guidance on selecting services or how to structure your privacy policy read How to Generate a Privacy Policy.
