Filtering URLs in Bulk

What's your experience

[hairycoo]

I've started going through my sites to see which ads are completely unrelated or landing pages are completely unsuitable.

I've added a large number of URLs to the Competitive Filter field and was wondering if I'm in for a shaky time before the new ads settle down.

Have you filtered lots of URLs at a time and seen some significant changes?

[celgins]

I haven't had any problems with my Competitive Ad Filter list. It usually takes a day or so for the ads to filter out, but I'm only filtering about 20 URL's at the moment.

I think you can filter as many as 200, so I'm not sure if adding 50 at a time will take longer.

[icedowl]

I usually don't add more than a couple at a time unless there is a flood of the worst type (categories 1 & 2 below).

Just this morning I decided that I'd best make a categorized list of those URL's currently in my filter list. I copied the list into notepad then sorted them into sections like these:

1. Totally Objectionable. These will always be blocked for various reasons. Some contain a spyware download which is extremely difficult to remove, even when following directions given at such sites as Norton. Some are connected with 'wacko' organizations.
2. MFA's
3. Site Targeters that are just wasting space
4. Questionable

I let all those in category 4 (Questionable) back for the time being. They may not ever appear again anyway, or they may find their way into one of the other categories and get blocked again.

[mzanzig]

Icedowl,

excellent approach. I have started to do a similar approach, except that I also lookup the domain owner of blocked domains. It's not too surprising that many of the blocked domains belong to the same advertisers. That's why a "block all ads by this advertiser" feature would be soo good for me.

[hairycoo]

I block sites that are totally unrelated to my site. How about EPC? Does it fluctuate when you start to heavily use the competitive filter?

[greatstart]

Speaking of ads that are unrelated, I just saw an ad for "McDonalds Spicy Chicken Sandwich" on one of my sites that are about computers. I had to filter that URL. The other one I saw last month was "Ford Explorer". Maybe that one showed up because there was content on the page that mentioned "Internet Explorer".

[icedowl]

The other one I saw last month was "Ford Explorer".

I got clobbered by that one too. I think they were just out for exposure.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

icedowl and others -

If you notice ads falling into the first category you outlined:

1. Totally Objectionable. These will always be blocked for various reasons. Some contain a spyware download which is extremely difficult to remove, even when following directions given at such sites as Norton.

Make sure you report them to AdWords so that we can investigate them further. Google ads should not contain spyware, so if you see something in violation of our policies please let us know.

Thanks!

-ASA

[Scurramunga]

A big <resounding> YES. I have always found a correlation between going heavy on the filter and achieving very healthy ctr. It's all done by good honest hard work and my filter is always full. My rountine is to keep tabs as much as possible. Because of the limitations of the preview tool, this is not easy, however since I started my revenue has more than doubled and tripled on some ocassions.

In fact only today I woke up to a ctr that was more than 60% down [from recent averages] on one of my highest performing pages. Lo and behold and whole bunch of new well targeted MFAS and spam directories had displaced legitimate ads. One of the so called ads purported to be a keyword tool for webmasters within my niche. I visited it and found it nothing to be a more than an MFA disguised as a keyword tool and the keyord results it yielded were more nothing more than google ads. This dismays me as I have always tried my hardest to keep spam away from my site.

I finally finished my weeding, and some hours later I am now noticing very sharp gains in both ctr and revenue. This sort of thing has happened on many ocassions before leading me to draw only one conclusion.

Just another point. Since starting my weeding fenzies a couple of months ago I have also noticed more higher paying clicks than before.

[edited by: Scurramunga at 12:26 am (utc) on Feb. 1, 2006]

[icedowl]

I guess I need to find out how to contact AdWords.

[Scurramunga]

Since my last post my CTR for the affected page has shot back up with a vengence. That's why my filter contains 200 urls made of
competitors 0%
off target ads 3%
MFAs, scammers, spam sites etc etc 97%