How to block irrelevant or unwanted Adsense ads

One of the ways to improve your Adsense ad’s CTR (click-through rate) is by serving only relevant ads. With Adsense this is achieved via the process of elimination i.e. by removing irrelevant ads. As smart as Adsense in placing ads based on the content of your blog, they’re not foolproof because some words do have different meanings.

Take for example my post on top commentators widget. It mentions the word “pipes” several times as the widget uses the service from Yahoo Pipes. And guess what? Half of the ads are about oil & gas and industrial pipes! I’ll need to filter them out to make way for more relevant ads lest no one will click them.

The next time you view your blog, do look at the ads served by Adsense. You’ll be surprised to see some of them are totally off-topic. If you don’t like those ads, you can prevent them from reappearing by following these simple steps:

 

1. Find the ad’s URL

This step is the trickier part of this two-step ad-blocking process. Make sure you don’t inadvertently (left) click on the ad in this process.

• Text ads

  All text ads have the ad URL displayed on them. Just highlight it and copy.

  

• Image and animated gif ads

  1. Right click on the image or hyperlink and choose "Copy Link Location" (Firefox) / "Copy Link Address" (Chrome) / "Copy Shortcut" (IE) to get the URL.
  2. Paste it in Notepad or any text editor.
  3. Find the word “adurl” in the URL.
     http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=l&ai= … [more letters and numbers here] … aExeA&client=ca-pub-4409443135154980&adurl=http://www.bad-ad.com/hobbies/store/uh_listCategoriesAndProducts.asp%3FidCategory%3D320&nm=4
  4. The URL following the “adurl” query is what you want. Copy it.

• Flash ads

  At the moment, the only way you can find the URL is by using Firefox’s Firebug add-on. Use Firebug’s Element Inspection tool:

  1. Click the Inspect Element tool icon on the left side of Firebug menu bar.
  2. Hover the ad and right-click to highlight the embed code.
  3. Click Edit tab to freeze the code. The code should look something like this:
     <embed height="250" width="300" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" allowscriptaccess="never" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="clickTAG=http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk%3Fsa%3DL%26ai% … [more letters and numbers here] … sqw%26client%3Dca-pub-4409159435223980%26adurl%3Dhttp://bad-ad.com/home.php%253Flang%253Den" wmode="opaque" id="google_flash_embed" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/imgad?id=CICAgICQztDDdBCsAhj6ATIIJ7Yq_ZLoL-o">
  4. Locate “adurl”, and copy the URL that follows.

2. Add the ad URL to Adsense filter

1. Go to Adsense’s Allow & Block Ads page.
2. On the left panel you will see a listing of your sites. Select the site/blog that you want to block the ad from. If you don't select any site, the ad will be blocked from all of the sites.
3. Paste the ad URL into the text box under Advertiser URLs tab. It is best to block the entire site of the unwanted ad rather than just an individual page. So instead of using the full ad URL:
   http://www.bad-ad.com/hobbies/store/uh_listCategoriesAndProducts.asp%3FidCategory%3D320
   which represents only a page, it’s better to trim the URL down to block the entire domain, like so:
   http://www.bad-ad.com
4. Finally click the Block URLs button. It will start blocking after 30 seconds or so.

Enjoy!