New York — Due to an increased display of interest from AdSense publishers in filtering ads, and asking about ad blocking is the result of the expensive, divisive battle over California’s Proposition 8. Arlene Lee of AdSense Publisher Support discussed a couple of tools at the Inside AdSense Blog.
Stung by complaints about political ads that have been appearing on the Web sites of its AdSense publishing partners, Google listened and quickly blogged that they will be speeding up the AdSense ad filter and increasing the ability to block categories. The blog post said:
We intend to improve the speed of your filters, and we are preparing to bring out improved filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour.
“When we notice increase in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can,” said Arlene Lee of Google AdSense support in a blog post on Monday. “There has been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here is a quick refresher on the filtering tools we offer.”
Google offers a Competitive Ad Filter, which allows AdSense publishers to curb as many as 200 contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads that appear on their Web sites by URL. 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:
- Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
- Click Competitive Ad Filter under the AdSense Setup tab (for AdSense for search results pages)
- Choose the appropriate product sub-tab
- Click Add / Edit Sites
- 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.
- 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
Its Ad Review Center provides broad ad control by allowing publishers to review specific ad groups and advertisers and to block ads by type. Users must opt-in to the “Ad Review Center” before being able to take advantage of these options.
The filtering of ads has become a highly hot topic due to some contentious political agenda-related ads that publishers have been featuring on their sites that they would prefer not to.
A Google spokesperson said the company does discuss revenue it has earned from specific ad campaigns and stressed that publishers do have options to control the kinds of ads that appear on their sites. She also said that Google has a separate policy for political ads that allows ads for or against particular ballot measures.
This announcement has made AdSense publishers pretty happy. A WebmasterWorld thread shows some of the positive feedback from publishers.