Jensense announces that Adwords advertisers can now negative filter publisher sites – meaning that advertisers can now block an ad appearing on your blog by simply adding its URL to their campaign filter (in a similar way to publishers having the ability to block certain advertisers – seems only fair really). The feature is known as the Negative Site Feature (catchy name).
Whilst this is good news for advertisers and for publishers of high quality sites – Jen observes that:
‘publishers with less-than-quality sites could be hit, particularly if advertisers are opting out simply based on appearances rather than conversion data. Because some of those less-than-quality sites definitely do convert for some advertisers, even if the sites don’t appear as though they would convert very well, some publishers could filter them on looks alone while not even considering their ROI on these sites.’
All In all I think that its a good move – it could draw more advertisers into the system which means more demand for ads and higher click throughs. Of course if you have a poor performing blog it could have negative impact.
I’m just glad that this is a full-url site blocker. If regular expressions (symbols like ‘*’) were allowed there would be huge exclusions of sites. I’m probably too small to ever be excluded by name (sweet!).
Yes… anything that helps the ROI of advertisers, helps the publishers in the long-run. Good move…