Norton and Adwords

[wayne]

Does anyone know if Norton is still blocking Adwords.
I know it was in the past, and Google changed the
type of link they were using so it wouldn't be blocked
anymore, but I just read in another forum that someone
had just purchased a new laptop and it came with
Norton Internet Security 2004 and it is blocking
Adwords on Google.

[eWhisper]

Just turned the Ad Blocking on in 2004 and checked Google and AdSense - both are showing.

In fact, looking through the settings, pagead2.googlesyndication.com isn't even in the list to be configured by Norton.

[skibum]

It depends on the click-through URL. Just got a new PC and tested out the ad blocker. LinkShare and Performics links didn't show, the old CJ links didn't show. This was in AdWords and on sites as well.

[eWhisper]

FYI - That was Norton 2005 I tried it on if it makes any difference.

Interesting Skibum. I just took another look through the blocked links section for Norton to see how it's working - and it's domain dependent - not AdWords based blocking (which was happening to some people). So, certain links won't click through and certain ones will.

[wayne]

This person on the other forum was saying that the
ads were not showing at all.

[Catalyst]

FYI Wayne, back when I was testing the body of the ads always showed, just the links were removed.

I was the one that originally scooped the Norton story and published articles all over about it. In the AdSense examples on my "Norton Blocks Affiliate Links" page Norton was blocking back then simple based on the word "ad" in the URL of ADSENSE ads. You can see the ads are there, just the links are missing. That's one of the ways it's always blocked.

I just did a QUICK check, maybe some URLS are formatted differently and I don't have Norton to test with. I refuse to touch it.

Adsense Ad (My guess is this may still be blocked due to the word AD still being in the url)
ttp://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead

AdWords Ad - may not be blocked unless the root domain is (no ad in the URL)
ttp://www.google.com/url?sa=l&q=http://www.xyz.com/cgi-bin/sbref.cgi%3Flink

From a support doc:

Technical Information:
Norton Internet Security maintains a list of more than 200 HTML strings that are associated with advertisements.

* For example, Norton Internet Security prevents Web pages whose URL includes www.ad.siemens.com from being displayed because the URL includes the HTML string "AD."
* In another example, Norton Internet Security prevents all or part of a Web page from being displayed when the URL includes the HTML string "&banner=" (without the quote marks).

Linda

[skibum]

It's kind of strange. Norton didn't seem to block Atlas redirects (which is a huge part of the ad serving market). When it blocked select AdWords links, it was still possible to click on the premium spots, presumably because the clickable area is more than just the title text. When it blocked the ads, the title didn't appear in premium or on the side spots. The advertiser probably keeps on racking up impressions but the CTR goes down and costs go up as a result or so it would seem.

[edited by: skibum at 6:58 am (utc) on Jan. 24, 2005]

[wayne]

Back in the past when it was blocking some ads, it
was blocking ads that were using the conversion
tracking available with Adwords. In the past they used
to use the words 'pagead/adclick' in the url
(http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum81/3558.htm), but Google changed the url so now it
contains the words '/pagead/iclk' in the url. Ads that
weren't using conversion tracking weren't being
blocked. Just wondering if they might have changed
something where conversion tracking could be causing
them to be blocked again or not, after reading the
post from the other person in the other forum. I don't
have Norton either, just thought maybe some people
that have it could test it.