Do you block Groupon ads?

[londrum]

I dont know where groupon gets all its money from, but whenever i look at my site these days, i see ads for groupon, groupon, groupon, groupon, groupon and groupon. text ads AND images ads too. so wherever there is an ad, there is groupon. even in my dreams, i see groupon.

and i end up with that stupid thing where one ad occupies all four spots -- resulting in tonnes of whitespace around one ad and it just looks silly. so i want to block them. but i suppose the ads must convert well, or they wouldn't be there.

have you got fed up with groupon and blocked them?

[Play_Bach]

I don't block anything. The Google I see at home isn't even the same thing as when I travel across town and use another computer. It has become far too complex and the "tools" we publishers have aren't enough for me, so I just concentrate on building a better site and let AdSense do what it does.

[Lame_Wolf]

I blocked them ages ago when they first appeared.

[Frost_Angel]

I'm the same as Lame_Wolf. They were plastering my site - it was like Groupon had taken over - so I blocked it months ago.

[numnum]

I've recently been thinking about blocking Groupon as well. Yes, it appears to me as well that they've been redoubling their Adwords campaign lately.

The only advertiser I've ever tried to block is something called Lumosity, whose ads show up far too often on my site than I would like (their relevancy to my site's topics is tangential at best). After all these months Lumosity ads still show up on my site just as often as before I blocked their domain. Don't ask me why -- I'm quite sure I followed the proper ad-blocking procedures.

In a recent thread somewhere else in this Adsense forum someone mentioned they've blocked nearly 100 advertisers. In view of the many, many irrelevant Adsense ads (some interest-based, others contextual) that show up on my site, I've been considering this approach. But I wonder whether I'd be fighting a losing battle, as other irrelevant ads would simply take their place -- perhaps at a lower bid amount.

BTW, yesterday at my site I noticed a text ad by a leading for-profit education company (you'd all know the name), and one of the key words in the ad title was misspelled. Intentional?--hard to imagine. ;->

[HuskyPup]

I have both Groupon and Google blocked.

[levo]

BTW, Google is now also using android.com and adwords.com for advertising, you might want to add them too.

[eddieh]

I block both the .co.uk and the .com of Groupon, Google and a Groupon lookalike called livingsocial.

At the end of the day, put yourself in the shoes of a normal visitor and ask yourself if you would click on ads from any of them. The ads are there more for brand awareness reasons rather than for anybody to click on. Even if anybody did click, would we as publishers even get paid for the click?

[londrum]

the groupon ads are actually quite well targeted to my site, and i wouldnt mind having them if they weren't so relentless.

they pretty much appear on every block. its wall-to-wall groupon.

[zerillos]

Brand awareness. That's the key. No one clicks their ads, so they don't cost them anything, which results in free exposure. I block all the ads fashioned in this way.

[JCKline]

I block groupon for the same reason I block google. To aggressive.

[numnum]

So for the purpose of blocking a specific Adsense advertiser, how do you determine that advertiser's URL from a display ad (as opposed to a text ad) that doesn't indicate the URL? Does Google expect a publisher to simply guess based on whatever information the ad provides? For some advertisements the second-level domain is obvious. But for many others, not so much.

[eddieh]

Be very careful when you do this but if you are running Firefox, hover over the ad in question and RIGHT CLICK on the ad (make sure it is RIGHT and NOT left click).

A little menu pops up in Firefox - Hover over the menu item that says 'This Frame'. Another sub menu pops up - select the option 'View Frame Source'.

The source code of that ad unit will then show and you should be able to see the URL of the ad.

[londrum]

when i right-click the link to get the URL, sometimes i see my own domain name at the end of the string. does that mean that my site has been targeted by the advertiser?

the only reason i ask, is because i've never yet seen the advertiser appear in the 'advertisers to block' box, and i was just wondering if that box is reliable

[eddieh]

You will see your own URL because the Ad is on your site. Without it, there would be no ability to track the URL from where any click was made. Go onto another site not belonging to you and you will see the URL of that site.

More importantly, you will be able to see the URL of the Ad which you can then add to your blocked URL list on your adsense dashboard.

[londrum]

but most of the strings do not include my url, so it cant be the way that they track it

[Lame_Wolf]

There are probably a lot more Groupon TLD's. Here are some of them...

.ca
.co.uk
.com.au
.com
.com.pr
.com.br
.com.my
.com.ar
.com.mx

I wish we could block sites completely. (www.example.*)

[netmeg]

I got tired of big glazed donuts on my sites (and they don't go very well with fireworks) but that was living social.

I don't think I have Groupon specifically blocked, but I haven't seen a lot of their ads anywhere recently. Either a lot of people are blocking them, or they're not running as many. I have a vague impression they're not doing as well as was once thought, but it's only a vague impression.