Adsense preview tool

Does it show the ads you see on the site?

[david_uk]

I'm in the UK, and it's important for me to know what ads are visible in the US. The preview tool (mostly) shows the ads I can see here, however I do wonder if some of the other ads displayed are ones they actually show. For example, the preview tool often shows ads on my block list.

I'm currently dumping scraper ads from my site (and getting a good increase in income), but there isn't any point in adding sites to the list that the preview tool has just thrown into the list because it felt like it. Not knowing what ads are showing in the US is a problem, as much of my site traffic is from there.

So would you guys in the US say that the ads you see in the preview tool are ones you would see on the site?

[lammert]

You could use a proxy located in the US and view your site through this proxy. In this way you actually view your site as an ordinary US visitor and the sites in your URL filter are not shown.

[Jenstar]

When you bring up the Preview Tool, click on the Options near the top, and you can select the geotargeting from the country drop down list. I have mine always set to United States, and I do see different ads than I see here.

[david_uk]

You could use a proxy located in the US and view your site through this proxy. In this way you actually view your site as an ordinary US visitor and the sites in your URL filter are not shown.

Thanks for this - I've got this working now and can see the ads displaying in the US. It's pretty cool to be able to see the US ads in Netscrape, and the UK ones in IE!

Thanks for your input too Jenstar - I was using it correctly, and I'll continue using it in addition to the proxy.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

david_uk –

You mentioned that ads from URLs you’ve added to your filter list continue to appear on your site. I’ll be happy to give you some tips to create more effective filters.

First, you need to make sure you are using the destination URL, which may be different from the URL displayed in the ad or the URL of the final page you end up on when you click on an ad. Using the preview tool, you can follow these steps to determine the destination URL:

-Right-click on the web page that contains the ad you want to exclude from your site.
-Select 'Google AdSense Preview Tool' from the menu.
-The preview tool will open in a new window, displaying a sample set of ads for that page. Select the checkboxes next to each ad you wish to filter.
-Click the 'Show Selected URLs' link to show the URLs in a new window.
-Copy and paste these URLs into your account's URL filter list to block any undesired ads.

Then, you should be sure to use the top-level domain to improve the effectiveness of your filters (unless, of course, you only want to filter ads from certain sub domains). For example, adding 'www.blogger.com' to your filter list would not block ads from 'blogger.com'. However, using 'blogger.com' would filter ads from both 'www.blogger.com' and 'pro.blogger.com'.

-ASA