How to identify Flash ads advertizer?

... to put it into the competitive ads filter

[Romeo]

To prevent bad user experience I occasionally tend to add some advertizers of untrageted or crappy ads to the 'Competitive Ads' filter list now and then.

I got used to find the advertizer's links buried as strings within a large chunk of encrypted bytes within the frame link when looking at the 'show frame source' information my web Firefox browser offers to me.

However, Google now sends anonymous Flash ads, without revealing any information about where they come from.
Completely encrypted link information like
[pagead2.googlesyndication.com...] and /pagead/imgad?id=CX3nnnwwwxxyyyzzhvgdsf9x
is not very helpful.
And the ad itself is not showing any identity either -- did I say crap? Anonymous lottery game crap in this case.
Unless I would >click< it (which, for the record, I do not do), I won't know where it comes from.

Looks like a bad move, it the 'Competivite' filter wouldn't be worth anything, because I can't use the filter as I like.

How to overcome this?
To generally disable ALL non-textual ads is probably too much, but I will finally have to do that as a last resort.

Or did I overlook something?

Kind regards,
R.

[Romeo]

... well, no answer with 2 weeks is an answer that speaks for itself.

At first I reduced the image ads to 5% to wait and see if that "win something" campain may eventually get retargeted elsewhere or get otherwise withdrawn, but it seems to be a long-term pest, so I have finally disabled all image ads by now.

I wish there would be more suitable means to control the ad inventory.

[poodwaddle]

Doesn't look like any of us have an answer for you. I disabled my image ads a while back because I had to many questions about them and they just don't seem to perform or pay as well as text. They take up the place of up to 5 ads and a click only pays as well as a click on a text ad. Unless they either pay 5 times as much or perform 5 times better they are a rip-off for the publisher and a bargain for the advertiser. I received a complaint from one of my users who assumed that the scam offer was somehow affiliated with my site. I was unable to find the site until I emailed the user and he was able to tell me. It seems that the whole appeal of image ads draws in the scams.
On a side note I have tried several other banner ad networks and found that they are full of these flickering "YOU HAVE WON" type of scams and require constant vigilance to defend against. I appreciate the effort AdSense makes to rid their network of these.

[Romeo]

Thank you, Poodwaddle.

Thinking about your words, it may finally turn out to be more fortunate than unfortunate that Google forced me to disable all image ads alltogether to get rid of just that one.
At least it helps for more quality and credibility of a site.

[stormshield]

I think you can decompile the SWF file and look up the url it points to. There are some good software to do that.

[poodwaddle]

The danger with decompiling the flash file is that it might count the download of the swf file as a click, but yes, there are decompilers available free. Find some here:
[download.com...]
This does, however, require you to have Adobe/Macromedia Flash.

[stormshield]

The danger with decompiling the flash file is that it might count the download of the swf file as a click

Hm... if he knows the direct url there should be no problem.

This does, however, require you to have Adobe/Macromedia Flash.

You can view pieces of code without leaving decompiler -- at least mine makes it possible.

[Romeo]

Thanks for the hint on decompiling.
However, this seems too much effort to just research a source of crap.

Originally, I dreamt about someone from the Plex (ASA?) may perhaps have come in to leave a comment like "ah, yes, we now realize that this may be a problem for honest publishers in regard of page quality and visitor experience, and we are going to fix it."
Yes, call me a dreamer ...
Technically, the advertizer's URL could be easily added in a comment string within the ads block, if they want. But apparently they don't want ...

Image ads are now finally switched off here -- problem solved for me.

Kind regards,
R.

[MikeNoLastName]

I'm not recommending this as a solution, I agree G ought to have a better way to handle this, but if it was ME, I would go ahead and click on the ad, get the URL (Assuming they aren't redirecting it against the G policy, like I've noticed a few doing recently - and duly reported as a policy violation) and then immediately e-mail G to tell them you "accidently/on purpose" clicked on the ad and why you HAD to do it (mentioning the fact that they offer a Competitive ad Filter with no way to make it work without violating the TOS), along with the crappy-ad company's URL and ad discription. Maybe if enough people do this, G will come up with a better method.