Competitive Ad Filter

I got three emails this morning all asking on how competitive ad filter works and how to set it up in the adsense account. These emails are not from my newbie readers so I reckon there are still problems being experienced with most users when using the competitive ad filter. I have successfully used the feature and I'll attempt to help you out with using it.

Google have the competitive ad filter feature in order to help adsense publishers block ads from competitors. You can block about 200 URLs using this feature. Of late, I have been using this feature to block out the Arbitrage guys especially the ones that use the tinyurl domain. This is because these guys bid like five cents per keyword and then when your readers click their ads, you get no pay or you get something like one cent. It's as good as giving them your traffic free. By the way, Google went on a massive shut down exercise of all MFA and arbitrage sites. However, I would like to believe the big G is still continuing the effort because there are still quite a number of those MFAs running. You can read more about this in a previous post I did called Google Becomes Strict With Adsense. To find out which URLs to block regarding MFAs it is worthwhile to visit Ads Black List.

How to use the competitive ad filter? I use the Adsense Preview Tool to find URLs. Login to your adsense account and then go to the Adsense Setup tab and select competitive ad filter. By the way, you can view your ads to see how they will look on your site using the Adsense Preview Tool. You can download the preview tool here. To specify how to block the url, take a look at an example taken from Adsense Help below.

Examples: example.com - block all ads across all subdomains
sports.example.com - block only ads across the 'sports' subdomain
sports.example.com/widgets - block all ads below a specific directory
sports.example.com/index.html - block all ads for a specific page

After specifying your URLs click save changes. Simple as that. For more help on competitive ad filter visit Adsense Help. If you still experience problems after this, send an email to support at Google on adsense-support@google.com.

Hope this post was of help to you.