About Grainger’s Ads & Tracking Activities

Our Interest-Based Advertising Activities

Grainger displays interest-based advertising using information you make available to us when you interact with us or our partners. This may include on our sites, or with our content or services. Interest-based ads, also sometimes referred to as personalized or targeted ads, are displayed to you based on information from your activities. For example, your purchases or browsing behavior. Or by visiting sites that contain Grainger content or ads, interacting with Grainger tools, or using our other services.

The information we collect enables us to learn about what ads you see, what ads you click, and other actions you take on our platforms. These may include our sites, other sites, or apps or content. This allows us to provide you with more useful and relevant ads. For example, if we know what ads you are shown we can be careful not to show you the same ones repeatedly.

Below are details of the technologies we use and the data capture we are able to do, along with ways, that you, as customers, can control these.

Our Interest-Based Ads

We may work with advertising companies to provide you with advertising on third party platforms that you visit that is as relevant and useful as possible. These ads may be based on information you submit on our platforms or platforms run by third parties. It may also be based on other interactions you have with us or our content. This might include interactions in our branches, or through emails you get from us. It could also be based on other activities and behaviors that you demonstrate online or through interactions with us or third parties. The information gathered may be used to serve you with advertisements on our platforms or on third party platforms.

Opting Out of Seeing Interest-Based Ads

The third parties we work with all participate in the Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising. This program provides consumers with the ability to opt-out of having their online behavior recorded and used for advertising purposes. If you want to opt out, visit http://www.aboutads.info/choices/.

Technologies We Use

We–or vendors we have hired–use several common data collection technologies including cookies, pixel tags, and similar technologies. These technologies are used to understand the activities and behaviors of our consumers and website visitors. We do this for many reasons, including the following:

• To recognize new visitors to our websites.
• To recognize past customers.
• To present more personalized content, to improve your website experience, optimize your shopping experience, and provide site and service enhancements.
• To serve customized advertising (whether on our website or others you visit).
• So we can better understand our audience, our customers, our website visitors, and their respective interests.

Controlling These Technologies

You may control our use of cookies. How you do so depends on the type of cookie. You can configure your browser to reject browser cookies. To control flash cookies go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html. Why? Because flash cookies do not reside in your browser, and thus your browser settings will not affect them. NOTE: If you configure your computer to block cookies, you may not be able to access certain functionality on our sites.