Least damaging way to improve ad relevancy

[kkinfy]

My understanding is that blocking irrelevant categories or personalized ads may help ad relevancy at the cost of decreased auction pressure/revenue. Will you still recommend blocking to a limited extent if the goal is to improve ad relevancy? Alternatively, do you block individual ads at the ad review center (though a cumbersome process)? If so, what is the a process you follow so that you don't damage the revenue much?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I haven't used adsense in some time even though I find myself needing a refresher to help a friend this week.... so take this with a grain of salt.

When I used adsense heavily many years ago I tested everything, including blocking controls. I found that once personalized ad serving was common it was best not to block any categories or individual ads. Not even the sensitive category ads because those don't show in areas where they are illegal and they don't show to specific demographics iirc.

disclaimer: I still blocked downloadable forms because of the spammy look of all the "start here" green buttons they had at the time, but that wasn't for financial purposes. I also saw a few ads this week that dynamicly populate a unit with multiple products but they are so slow to populate that the ad experience is horrible, the units are empty for up to 10 seconds as they process the items into the ad.

Sure, those might bid a lot but nobody can click on them... the units try to personalize the ad when adsense already has.

The only thing I found beneficial to block was the ad partner programs, all of them, and to turn off automatic approval for new ones. I don't know if things have changed and I know they have some 30,000 partner networks but I have not heard of a single case where a partner network outperforms Google's adwords.

[tangor]

Relevance is subjective: yours or theirs? Never having found any hard and fast rules, and never seeing anything concrete with any efforts on my part, it became a "go with the flow" and quit complaining/improving/restricting...

YMMV