Google AdSense

Harry is our youngest recruit, spending time on the content team monitoring advertising on social properties as well as delving into community management. Today Harry is going to share what he has learned through his time at SilverDisc.

What is AdSense?

AdSense is a Google-run display ad program that gives site owners the opportunity of displaying advertisements on their site. The different types of adverts that Google AdSense offer are automatic text, image, video, or interactive rich-media advertisements.

How do I see adverts that are or could possibly appear on my site?

The way to manage the different adverts on AdSense is easy. Simply go to www.google.com/adsense and assuming you are logged into Google, you will go straight to a page where the different earnings from different time periods will appear on your screen.

To manage your ads go to ‘Allow & block ads'. This will take you to a page where you can see ‘Advertiser URLs’. On the same row of tabs as ‘Advertiser URLs’ you will be able to see ‘Ads (Ad review centre)’. This tab will take you to all adverts, allowed and blocked.

The difference between the 'advertiser URLs' tab and the 'Ads (Ad review centre)' tab is the 'Ads (Ad review centre)' will show you the actual advertisements that will appear on your site, so you can preview what they will look like.

What is allowed and blocked adverts?

Allowed adverts are advertisements on your site that you like. You may like them because they look good because they have relevance to your site or even because a lot of people click on them.

Blocked adverts are advertisements you don't like. This might be because they are flashing because they just start making noise or simply because you do not like them. Blocked adverts will not appear on your site, whereas allowed advertisements will.

How can you tell if you have a bad advert on your site?

Bad advertisements stick out like the kid who forgot it was a non-uniform day. There are quite a few different types of bad advertisements. Some are:

Foreign advertisements

Foreign advertisements are usually a call for a block. This is because they usually don’t convert to the language of the site's audience. For example, if a French advertisement network published French advertisements on your Spanish website, no users will click on it, so it is important which advertisements appear on your site.

Flashing advertisements

Flashing advertisements are a cry for a block! Nothing screams scam as much as a flashing advert! Usually, for a flashing advertisement, you would block the advert network but that depends on what site your adverts are showing on, as some websites like flashing advertisements.

Disturbance advertisements

Advertisements that disturb the traffic to your site by doing things such as saying there is an error on the page or even sometimes closing the page are always a must for the block button. It is rare to find an advert that will affect the use of the site but when you do, block it!

If I block an advert, can it come back?

There are a couple of ways to get rid of an advert, one way is to just block the advert, another way is to block the advert provider from providing you with their adverts, and this will block the flow of spam networkers forcing horrible ads onto your site. Blocking a URL is very useful because if an advert keeps appearing on your site no matter how many times you have blocked it, you can just block the specific URL. This will also keep the account but just stop it from sending adverts to the specific site.

This method is usually used when an advert comes through and it looks bad, or for example, it could just start making noise and you don’t want that. When you block an ad network, the whole network will stop sending adverts through to your site completely, no matter if they are good or bad. This is commonly done when a network is foreign to the language on your site or when a network consistently pushes spam adverts on your site.

When you block an advert, it is rare you will see it again. If you accidentally blocked an advert, you can still go back and unblock it so it will appear on your site again; this is the same with the networks.