AdSense has just announced a fairly significant new feature that will help publishers to monitor what ads are being targeted on their blogs to see if they are relevant and appropriate for that site.
I complained in a number of recent posts that I didn’t really have any idea what ads were appearing on my blogs in other parts of the world – so you can imagine that I’m pretty happy with this development.
It’s called the Ad Review Center and AdSense say that it will roll out to publishers ‘over the next few months’ (they are rolling it out with publishers slowly over time). It will be something that you need to check regularly as you will have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on the site.
There are two options with reviewing ads – ‘auto allow’ which lets all ads run as soon as they are set up by an advertiser and ‘manual review’ which means ads don’t appear on your site until either you approve them or until the 24 hour waiting period is over.
It only allows you to see what ads are being specifically targeted to your blog (ie not normal contextual ads) but this is important as advertisers are increasingly using the targeting feature and at times what they’ve done with the ads have been inappropriate to the sites that they’re advertising on.
The new feature allows you to view the ads and block those that are inappropriate. You’re asked to share a reason why you’ve blocked it (this is shared with advertisers).
Inappropriate ads might include:
- competitors ads
- ads from companies that you don’t want to be associated with
- ads that are visually inappropriate
- ads that attack you as a publisher in some way (I’ve seen more and more of these lately)
I’m not yet activated for this new feature – but from what it sounds like – it’s a good move from AdSense.
Full details at Inside AdSense: Introducing the Ad Review Center
This would be an extremely good move for people using adsense. It’d allow content sensitive websites to only allow the stuff that wouldn’t affend it’s members
Quoting back the why not to use adsense, you said that religious websites shouldn’t, but if this came into play it’d probably be ok if the adverts were regulated
I really like the idea of being able to review Google ads before they appear on your site. I think this change is going to make a lot of people happy.
I think this is going to be great. The advertisers might be mad at first, but in my opinion they should be happy too, since they are getting accepted on sites that the owner KNOWS the ad is targeted right.
Yippee – no more allergy ads on my embroidery website!
This is great – I actually have people complaining about my ads. As if I had something to do with them – it sounds like shortly I very well might! Great news – thanks!
wow .. finally !!! 2008 will be a great year… finally adsense add this feature… It will push advertisers to make better ads. Adsense is making great move after great move. everyone will be a winner
I just started using another ad program that uses the same option (auto approve or manual approve) and I prefer it so much more especially being that my site is targetted at parents and children I don’t need certain ads popping up on there! So glad that Adsense is jumping in on it too :)
A great move from adsense they are improving day by day controlling the ads will be great for me i am desperately waiting for this new feature
Most of the time, googlers come up with pretty smart ideas. That’s why they are the leader.
“It only allows you to see what ads are being specifically targeted to your blog (ie not normal contextual ads)”
i.e. this feature isn’t for the long tail.
not sure about that Scott. I just think it’s not practical for them to tell you every ad that is appearing on you blog contextually. There must be potentially thousands of them. I know that I don’t have time to review them all.
gr8 feature.
I agree we can t possibly review all but the idea of giving control to the publisher is very liberating.
vineet nair
http://vineetnair.com
Darren 2 Quick questions:
Text versus Images versus Video Units… and GoogleBot visits
1. Do you think this update allow you to use images/video units more effectively?
(updating
https://problogger.com/adsense-launch-video-units/)
2 have you any numbers you can share on googlebot visits?
Last Friday (7th December) we started doing this thing on our site and I am looking to get some kind of perspective.
Basically we have developed a script that automatically pulls in YouTube videos that match our topic
The SEO we get on the pages we create is scarily good… out ranking YouTube in some instances (?!?)
I noticed that the googlebot visits shot up over the weekend from around 100 visits a day to over 250
On the 11th – 416
On the 12th – 381
This morning – Dec 13th – it’s already 722 and there’s ten hours to go
On another forum I was told not to worry about it – more visits is good…
Can you confirm this
Thanks
TomC
This is going to be so so great
I think that it’s a great feature. i hate to see ads on my blog. I’ll earn less… patience!!
Adsense moves forward again.
This is good news and should be very useful.
Being a small blog, I wonder if I actually have any targeted ads :o)
cool :-)
Correction: *ads from companies that you don’t (want) to be associated with
i hate to see ads of my competitor. sorry for the wrong post
I have to agree, this is a great move from the AdSense team. I don’t think you will need to review and approve them but rather it gives you the option to review and reject certain ads which will be great for content sensitive sites and getting rid of competitors.
It might depend on ad selection choices and adsense’s system for implementation. Maybe site owners with adsense could all end up choosing similar ads from a given advertiser (if some ads/products/advertisers become popular). Possibly then, their could be too many similar adsense ads in web sites for given topics.
I suppose it’s a start to get a view and choice of advertisers and their categories that are signed up with adsense. But many it seems, want to sell via adsense, blog about it, and optimize adsense (like me) and so on. But what avenues or systems are available to the actual purchaser’s (or potential purchaser’s) that buy through adsense – that could benefit us as adsense site owners?
This is very much appreciated, i have been getting some strange ads in my blog.
Mohammed.
http://mopedia.blogspot.com/
It would be even better if they told you the price range of each advertiser, but for obvious reasons, I guess thats never going to happen:0
It’s going to be a great feature. Though I don’t mind showing competitor’s ads on my site as I want every visitor to freely see and choose whatever service is available on the net.
It could be a good think but always additional work for everyone so i dont think its that great move by Adsense.
Wow, this is good news. I just started up a new blog about music — primarily punk and underground — and got targeted by some bible thumpers who put ads on my site to uh, bring my readers to Jesus.
Not cool. As you can imagine, I was not a happy camper. Glad I found out how to filter their URL. But this will be better.
I know that they were trying to cut down on the fraudulent clicks but its kind of hard for anyone to earn revenue from AdSense ever since they modified their publishing of the ad’s and changing what parts of the ad could be clicked.
Maybe this is better for those AdWords advertisers…