Last year we launched sensitive category blocking in order to give you more control over the ads that appear on your sites by letting you opt out of receiving ads that fall into potentially sensitive specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics.
Today we’re excited to announce that we’re beginning to test a related new feature called general category blocking with a small group of publishers. General category blocking will allow you to block even more categories of ads from appearing on your site.
We’re testing this feature with 170 more specific categories, including finance, travel, job, and automotive. This feature will allow publishers to block up to 50 ad categories from among a broad range of 170 fine grained categories. To help you understand potential changes to your earnings, we’ll provide you with the percentage of your total revenue and total impressions that fall under each category.
General category blocking will initially apply only to ads in English, regardless of the language of the site. We are working on expanding it to other languages in the future.
This feature is available in the new AdSense interface, which is currently in beta and being tested by a limited number of publishers.
Although we’re not able to expand this test to additional publishers at this time, we wanted to give you a glimpse into one of the ways we’re working to give you even more control over the ads that appear on your site. Over the coming months we’ll be working hard to refine this feature so that we can roll it out more broadly in the future. Please stay tuned to the blog for any updates, and feel free to leave us a comment in the meantime.
Posted by Atul Bhandari – AdSense Product Manager
Link: Announcing beta test of expanded category blocking – Inside AdSense
The next two days my earnings dropped about 30% so I blocked all non fitting categories again.
My earnings instantly raised again to their normal levels.
So I think a more fine tuned category blocking will actually help us better to define the ads that are shown to our visitors and therefore get better CTRs.
What's your opinion on this?
admin
But for me I have so many different topics that I cannot use this category blocking feature.
It would be way better if we could block categories depending on our URLs.
like if I want to block some categories for a whole site I would create a category filter for:
mysiteurl.com
if I want to block categories for a whole folder I would create a filter like this:
mysiteurl.com/mycategory/*
And of course if I want to block a category for the whole account we could still do it.
But at the moment this feature is too wide for me, not useful.
I have the luck to have all websites in one niche (more or less) so I can apply global category blocking without harming any of my sites.
We'll see if Adsense does fine tune this feature to domains however I don't expect this to be soon.