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AdSense Competitive Ad Filter Size Increase

April 15th, 2009 by Eric Giguere Leave a reply »

Catching up on some AdSense news, been pretty busy lately. The big news that will make some publishers very happy is that Google has increased the number of URLs you can add to the competitive ad filter from 200 to 500.

The AdSense competitive ad filter lets AdSense publishers exclude specific ads from appearing on their content sites. This exclusion is done by URL only, which some publishers think is too limiting. The URLs you enter into your filter are matched against the display and destination URLs of the AdWords ads that are to be displayed on your sites. Any ads whose URLs match one of the entries in your filter are not displayed on those sites.

The primary purpose of the competitive ad filter is to prevent direct competitors from bidding for advertising space on your sites. If your primary business is selling widgets and you have a blog about widgets, you typically don’t want someone else advertising widgets on that blog. The filter is the only tool you have to reject those ads.

A secondary purpose is to block inexpensive ads for “MFA” (made-for-AdSense) sites from appearing on your sites. This was a big deal a couple of years ago, but I don’t see many people talking about that now. Google did crack down on using AdSense arbitrage as a way of generating traffic to AdSense sites. (You can still do it, but only using carefully-targeted ads that directly relate to the content of your landing page.)

The ad filter is a manually-intensive process — you have to figure out which URLs you don’t want yourself, often only be looking at the ads you see on the site — and it’s not something that most AdSense publishers should worry about, but it’s there if you’re having some problems.

Unrelated note: My new blog, I’m Not In Marketing, premiered yesterday. If you’re a techie, check it out!

14 comments

  1. Bambosi Blog says:

    Yes, Adsense Arbitrage is dead now…. We can’t cheat google system :)

  2. Siju says:

    This updation really nice. But the problem is how we can find sites which are made for adsense from the list of ads displayed on our website.

    Is there any way to find out the PPC of an ad displaying on our website?

  3. Eric Giguere says:

    Google tells you how to do this using the AdSense preview tool, actually.

  4. John says:

    The increase on the competitive ad filter is really nice news. Its still beat that it can’t be done by keywords.

  5. One thing I never liked about the AdSense competitive ad filter is that it’s difficult if not imposible to guess the URL for many image based ads. Also I’m not sure you’re not losing money by filtering ads. This only makes sense if you’re #1 in SERP. If you’re #5, isn’t it better that people reaches your competition by clicking on your ad than by following #4 or #2 in SERP?

  6. Robb says:

    Seems to be one new feature added, one old feature broken while undergoing renovation. If I had a dollar for every post I’ve seen in the past month or so, where people are getting ads displayed in the wrong language on their site, I wouldn’t need adsense any more!

  7. Glen says:

    I think the major limiting factor with manually entering your competitors is that it is impossible for you to identify competing sites that pop up over night.

  8. On this page you will find more information on te preview tool.

    https://www.google.com/adsense/previewtool

  9. Larry McLeod says:

    I guess like anything, when there money to be mase (arbitrage) Google wants it.

    “Is there any way to find out the PPC of an ad displaying on our website?”

    You can use the Adsense preview tool

  10. Very cool, this makes it a lot easier to run a campaign that is truly targeted and valuable. Great news!

  11. primar says:

    I agree with you all, adsense world is more competitive right now, it is so hard to find niche, but every problem has its own solution right? we just have to find that .. :) )

  12. perde says:

    Google tells you how to do this using the AdSense preview tool, actually.

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