The Google Adsense program has allowed thousands of webmasters to turn what once were simple “hobby sites” into serious money-making enterprises. Simply sign up for the program, paste a snippet code on the page, then sit back and watch your visitors click to YOUR heart’s content. It really is that simple.
The key to success with Adsense is making sure the ads displayed perfectly match the topic of the page on which they’re placed. About 95% of the time the Google Media Bot does a great job at determining the theme of the page, and the ads are right on target. But the other 5% can have you pulling your hair out on a daily basis. Off-topic ads don’t usually get clicked, which means they don’t earn any money for you.
Google has provided a fast and easy way to block off-topic ads from showing up on your site(s). All you have to do is log into your Adsense account and add the landing page URL for the offending ads to the Competitive Ad Filter. But how do you find out what the landing page URL is without clicking on your own ads (which will quickly get you kicked out of the program)? Well, here’s the fastest way I have found to date:
1. Right-click on the offending ad. Yes, I said RIGHT-CLICK. To be absolutely certain that I don’t accidentally “click on my own ad”, I completely remove my finger from the left mouse button. And yes, it IS that critical that you NEVER click your own Adsense ads!
2 . After right-clicking on the ad, a context menu will pop up. On this menu, click “Copy Shortcut”.
3. Paste the contents of the clipboard into Notepad. You’ll see several lines of gibberish code. Embedded near the end of that string of code will be the landing page of the off-topic ad.
4. Ignoring everything else, highlight and copy the URL and then paste it into the Competitive Ad Filter located in the Adsense control panel. You’re done!
It might take a few minutes for the change to take effect, but once it does you should never see that ad on that page again. Bear in mind that filtering the URL for a specific landing page will only block the ads that take the “clicker” to that particular ad. Other ads for the same advertiser will still show up. To block the ads for an entire site from advertising on your site, place just the top level domain itself into the filter (i.e. www.example.com).
About the author: Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE.COM and a number of other popular websites. He has been an Adsense publisher since its inception.