Google Ads User Data Retention Policy

Signed-in Google users can delete past searches, browsing history, and other authenticated activity from their Google Accounts. We retain this information, and it may inform the user’s signed-in ads profile, until a user deletes it. When these events are deleted, they will no longer contribute to that user’s signed-in ads profile. For more information about the data deletion functionalities available in My Activity, please refer to the My Activity help center. Signed-in users can also view and edit their Google account ads profile in Ads Settings.

Some advertising products include features that give marketers the ability to upload audience lists for targeting on Google media and third party sites. In these cases, the marketer using these features is in control of the membership duration of the uploaded list.

• For more information on how to delete users from lists uploaded into the DoubleClick Campaign Manager, please refer to the DoubleClick Campaign Manager help center.
• For more information on how to set membership durations for AdWords Customer Match lists, please refer to the AdWords help center.

Google uses cookies and similar identifiers such as advertising IDs to power advertising services for users not signed in to their Google Account. We store a record of the ads we serve in our logs. These server logs typically include a user’s web request, IP address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of the ad request, and one or more cookies or an advertising ID that may uniquely identify that user’s browser or mobile device. We anonymize IP addresses in logs by removing part of the address after 9 months. After 18 months, we further anonymize log data by removing cookie or advertising ID information in both logs and ad serving databases.

User profile information associated with advertising cookies and advertising IDs is also stored in databases that can be accessed for ads serving in real-time. Data stored in these databases is either deleted or anonymized after 18 months.

User data tied to cookies and advertising IDs is also used to detect and prevent ad fraud and ensure that users don’t see ads that they’ve blocked in the past. In these cases, or in cases where Google stores this data on behalf of its customers (e.g. in Google Analytics), data may be stored for periods longer than those specified above.