Google Adsense Competitive Ad Filter

Inappropriate Adsense On Your Pages

So you’re sick of the Muslim dating site advert that Google Adsense, in its wisdom, keeps displaying on certain pages of your “make money easy” blog and finally decide to do something about it. You have two options:

1. Change your content to give the very clear message to Google that your site is as far away from the Muslim singles dating game as you can get. You can do this by using more “keywords” in your content and emphasizing them with the appropriate markup (<strong>, <em>, headings – you know the drill).
2. Use the competitive ad filter in adsense.

Actually, the dating site ads are a bad example because there is obviously something wrong with your content if completely irrelevant adsense like this is being displayed. Unless of course, your site is about Muslim singles, and then these ads are fine! Moving on…

Using The Adsense Competitive Ad Filter To Avoid Giving Money Away

Let’s suppose instead that your site is in the money making ideas niche and adverts for your competitors in the same niche keep appearing on your pages. The last thing you want to do is advertise your competition and send your visitors over to your arch enemy’s site. Changing the content is not an option as it is already laser targeted on your carefully chosen money making keywords. The elegant solution is to use the Google Adsense Competitive Ad Filter to filter out ads you don’t want to display.

How The Competitive Ad Filter Works

Follow these simple steps:

1. Get offended by an adsense advert that you would like to zap.
2. Determine either the display URL or the destination URL of the advert.
3. Access the Competitive Ad Filter section of your Adsense Setup.
4. List the URLs whose adverts you don’t want to display.
5. Take a break. Eat a kit kat.

If you’re like me and get offended by everything, step 1 is a doddle. Determining the display/destination URL of the advert’s, however, can be a little tricky because the display URL is not always present. You can’t click on the adsense to find out where it goes as this violates Google’s programme policies.

To find the destination URL you can go the convoluted route, where you right click on the adsense, copy the link location, paste it into notepad and extract the actual destination URL from the humungous googleads string of text.

Or you can go the slick and professional route by using a snappy little tool called the AdSense Preview Tool.

AdSense Preview Tool

The AdSense Preview Tool adds an extra option to the right-click menu in your web browser. To get it:

1. Save the AdSense Preview Tool to your desktop. When I did this it mysteriously developed a .txt extension, so you may have to rename the file to remove it.
2. Run the .reg file. This will add arcane information to your registry that will change your world as you know it.
3. In Internet Explorer 6.x browsers (I couldn’t get this to work in Firefox), right click on an Adsense advert and select Google Adsense Preview Tool.
4. Select the adverts that you want to remove and then click Show Selected URLs.
5. A window pops up with the destination URLs. Copy these and add them to your Competitive Ad Filter list.