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
