Can I Choose which Adsense Ads Appear on My Site?

The answer is no – and yes!

Adsense works by autodetecting the content of your page.  Usually it is fairly accurate.  However, if ads are displayed that you don’t want for any reason you can block them by adding them to the “competitive ad” filter.

How to Use the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter

Log into your Adsense account and click on the “Adsense Setup” tab.  Then click on “Competitive Ad Filter”.

Enter one web address per line in the box and scroll down and click on Save Changes.

How can you tell the web address of an Adsense ad? NEVER click on your own ads to find out where they take you.  Google will BAN you for click fraud.

Fortunately – they provide an answer in the form of the “Adsense Preview Tool”.

What is the Adsense Preview Tool?

This is an add-on for Internet Explorer.  Download it from here – Adsense Preview Tool.  One this is installed it adds an extra item to the RIGHT click menu in IE.

When you click on “Google Adsense Preview tool” from this menu you will see a list of ads that could be displayed on your site.

You can click to put a tick beside the ads whose URLs you want to know.

Then click on “Show Selected URLs”.  The URLs will be displayed in a box.  You can copy them from here and paste them into your competitive ad filter.

NOTE:  If the URL you copy is too long for the ad filter, you will see a message in red displayed after you click on “Save changes”.  Just delete as much of the URL as is necessary to reduce it to 64 characters or less.  If you look at the URL, you will probably find that most of it an be deleted so that you are just left with something like www.myunwantedsite.com