Due to an increased show of interest from AdSense publishers in filtering ads, Arlene Lee of AdSense Publisher Support discussed a couple of tools at the Inside AdSense Blog.
Competitive Ad Filter
The Competitive Ad Filter allows AdSense publishers to add as many as 200 URLs to block. The main reason that publishers would want to do this is to block ads from competitors’ sites that may otherwise be served due to contextual implications. To use this feature Google provides the following steps:
1. Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click Competitive Ad Filter under the AdSense Setup tab (for AdSense for search results pages)
3. Choose the appropriate product sub-tab
4. Click Add / Edit Sites
5. In the appropriate text box, enter the URLs of the sites whose ads you would like to filter from your site or AdSense for search results pages. Enter one URL per line.
6. Save your changes
A few other things to note as provided by the AdSense Help Center are:
– Entering example.com will block ads to example.com and example.com/sub
– Entering example.com will also block ads to www.example.com and forums.example.com
– www.example.com will block ads to www.example.com but not to forums.example.com or example.com
– example.com/sub will not block ads to example.com/products or example.com/sub/index.html
Ad Review Center
AdSense also offers the Ad Review Center, which allows users to review ad groups and advertisers before they appear on their pages, giving them added control over what ads are served. From here, users can filter them based on the following options that Google Outlines:
– No Action: Means what it says. If you have your review preference set to auto-allow, ads that you take no action on will be automatically switched to ‘Allow this ad only’ after 24 hours.
– Allow all ads from this advertiser: When this advertiser targets ads to your pages, they will automatically be allowed to appear and will show up on your Allowed subtab.
– Block all ads from this advertiser: When this advertiser targets ads to your pages, they will automatically be blocked and will show up on your Blocked subtab.
– Allow this ad only: This ad group is eligible to appear on your pages. Does not impact other ad groups from the same advertiser.
– Block this ad only: This ad group is blocked from appearing on you pages.
Users must opt-in to the Ad Review Center before being able to take advantage of these options.
The filtering of ads has become an increasingly hot topic due to some controversial political agenda-related ads that publishers have been featuring on their sites that they would prefer not to. The comments on the Inside AdSense post are a pretty clear indication of this. Political agendas aside, it should still be useful for publishers to know that these tools are at their disposal.
