Happy Friday and welcome to the second installment of the ad blocking series! In our
first blog post, we talked about different reasons for blocking ads and common myths about ad blocking. Today we’ll discuss how to block ads you don’t want to allow on your site. Once you’ve identified the ads you don’t want to show, there are a few ways to block them: by advertiser URL, general or sensitive category (
limited language availability), ad network, and individual ad creative. Below, we’ll bust more myths commonly believed about blocking unwanted ads.
Myth: The ‘Allow and block ads’ tab of my account is the only place I can block ads.
In addition to blocking ads via the AdSense interface, you can install the
Google Publisher Toolbar to block ads while viewing your pages in a Chrome browser. The Publisher Toolbar is a Chrome extension that lets you view up-to-date information about your AdSense account, offers an overview of your earnings and performance, and provides ad overlays with in-page reporting. For more details on this new Chrome extension, visit the
Inside AdSense blog post.
Myth: Because the ad is an image or rich media, there’s no way to find the destination URL without clicking the ad and violating AdSense policy.
As a publisher, you have a few options when trying to find out which URL you want to block:
- If you’re using Chrome, install the Publisher Toolbar extension mentioned above, which allows you to block ads as you’re seeing them on your site.
- In your AdSense account, you can opt into the Ad Review Center where you can see all of the ads shown on your site, including text, image, and rich media ads.
Myth: I don’t see any ads in the Shown Ads tab of the Ad Review Center, but I see ads on my site. The Ad Review Center doesn’t work!
The Ad Review Center is a tool that allows you to review individual ads and choose whether or not to let them be displayed on your pages. Ads in the Ad Review Center have shown within the last 30 days. If your site has not shown any ads within the last 30 days, no ads will show in the Ad Review Center. Also, if you have very low traffic on your site, you may not see ads in the Ad Review Center. After you’ve submitted the request to opt in to the Ad Review Center, please allow 24 to 48 hours for ads to begin showing under the Shown Ads tab. Read more information about the new and improved Ad Review Center in our previous
Inside AdSense blog post.
We hope that this blog post has busted some of the myths associated with the ad blocking feature. Have more questions? You can submit them by commenting on the post on the Google
AdSense +page. We’ll be answering those questions in a Google+
Hangout on Air on Tuesday, August 7th at 10am PDT. We hope you can join us!
Posted by: Wesley Houser,
Inside AdSense Team
