More control over the ads you serve on your site(s)

We’ve heard the feedback that publishers like you have shared about wanting more ways to control the ads showing on your site(s). Today, we’re excited to share some recent updates to General Category Blocking that give you more controls to opt-in or filter out certain categories of ads -- putting you in charge.

General Category Blocking was introduced in some countries in 2010 to help you scalably prevent competitors’ ads and ads that may not fit your audience from appearing on your site, by letting you opt out of showing ads from certain categories and subcategories such as “Finance,” “Apparel,” and “Tourism.” Over the last few weeks we’ve increased the number of categories and subcategories from 250 to 470. This update lets you be more granular and block more specific categories without overblocking and having an unwanted negative impact on earnings. For example, instead of blocking the category “Apparel,” you can now pick any of the new subcategories “Sunglasses,” “Handbags,” or “Watches.” With this update we’ve also expanded our supported languages to include Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Turkish and made this feature available in every country supported by AdSense.

With more options available it’s important to carefully consider the impact of blocking, or allowing, a category. Blocking a general category could lower your potential earnings as the affected advertisers’ bids are excluded from the auction. On the other hand, with more subcategories available you may have the opportunity to be more granular and pick the subcategory that most closely matches the type of ad you want to prevent -- minimizing the negative impact on your earnings.

We know how important it is to have control over the ads that appear on your site, and this update is adding to a set of controls available in AdSense already. We’d love to hear what you think about these update so please leave your feedback in the comments field below.