Forum Moderators: martinibuster
However, I was puzzled to find two very annoying fleas (those with five random letters plus .net TLD) that would show up in the tool. OK, I added them to the filter, but surprise surprise, the tool complained that these have been blocked already ("duplicate entry")! A-ha.
In the past I found that domains that were blocked were blocked indeed. So this is a new behaviour.
@AdsenseAdvisor - could you relay this to the relevant unit within the Plex, please? Many thanks.
Today I experienced exactly the same problem again: the Preview Tool shows an ad that I do not want to see. I let the tool show me the target URL, and -surprise!- the URL can not be blocked because it is already blocked. Ho-hum.
Now, the interesting thing is that the owner of the target domain is a huge affiliate marketeer. This is interesting because one of the OTHER domains that had this very problem (see OP) is also run by exactly this affiliate marketeer. They run eBay ads and all kinds of crap.
Sooo, I just hope that the Preview Tool is broken and that my visitors do not see the ads that I have been blocking for a long time. On the other hand, if the blocked ads would display, then this might explain the extreme CTR reduction that I have been seeing for a few weeks now. In my experience, whenever CTR goes down extremely, I find a number of MFAs or low quality landing pages.
Needless to say, I would be extremely worried if some "premium" advertisers can simply bypass filter lists, and I do not believe (hope) that this is the case. Just the thought makes me sick.
ASA [should you read this], please could you check with the Preview Tool folks whether there is a problem with the tool?