Rob Pegoraro

Special for USA Today

Q. Every time I look for something on Amazon, I get ads for the same product on every other site. How do I make that stop?

A. “Retargeting” — showing you ads for something you’ve looked for at some online store even as you visit other sites, in the hope that the reminder will persuade you to complete the purchase — is a common marketing practice. But Amazon’s outsized inventory and the time many of us spend there can make its retargeted ads more obvious and obnoxious than most.

I realized this firsthand a few weeks ago, when a few searches to check prices for a toilet seat left me staring at Amazon photos of toilet seats through the rest of the evening’s Web reading.

You can avoid this problem by doing your online shopping in a private-browsing or incognito-mode window. But it’s easy to forget to do that when you have 10 different pages open in tabs in your browser and you’re also switching between the Web, e-mail and other apps.

Instead, you can tell Amazon to stop sending you ads based on your shopping habits. To do that, visit amazon.com/adprefs or log into your Amazon account in a browser, click on your username in the top right corner of the page, and then click on the “Your advertising preferences” link.

How to prevent ads from following you online

On that page, click the button next to “Do Not Personalize Ads from Amazon for this Internet Browser” and then click the “Submit” button below it. You may still see Amazon ads, but they won’t be keyed into your recent queries and clicks around the Seattle retail giant’s site.

You will, however, have to repeat this on each browser that you use for any Amazon shopping. That’s a consequence of how Amazon does this retargeting. First, Amazon’s site saves your recent searches in a “cookie” file stashed in your browser’s settings folder on your computer, then Amazon ads on other sites can then read that cookie to see what product to feature.

If you only have a couple of embarrassing or lame Amazon searches that you don’t want to pollute other pages, you can also edit your own search history. Visit amazon.com/gp/history and click “Remove” under every product you wish to shove down the memory hole.

Click the “Manage history” heading at the top right, and you can also turn off the browsing-history feature (a handy option if, say, you’re shopping for your Valentine) or remove all your history (a handy option if you want to leave Amazon feeling very confused). You can do this same history revision in Amazon’s mobile apps; tap the menu button and tap “Browsing History,” in some cases after first selecting “Your Account.”

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.