Why would anyone use the Competitive Ad Filter?

I'm trying to get my head around why anyone would use the Competitive Ad Filter in AdSense. I see innumerable posts about it, both here and at Webmasterworld, and I'm confused -- if you enter sites in it, that takes away the number of sites that are bidding for placement in the ad spots on your site, and ultimately can lead to lower earnings. Why does anyone use it?

 

Your site may offer widgets for sale, and you make $5 profit on each one you sell. You do not want competitors ad's to appear on your site, if you get 25 cents per click but you lose a potential customer.

 

you may know of a certain advertiser that
only pays .01 or .02 a click, so it might
be wise to filter those out of your site(s)

 

Another reason: you just might not want certain ads appearing on your site. For example, I sometimes get banners from Google advertising "Sexual Content" - I block these since I don't want my site to have a bad reputation thanks to Google's flawed targeting. 99% of the time they are spot on, but for 1% of the time I have to help out and filter things.

 

There is a lot of trash being advertised. If you don't want those ads to show up on your site, use the Competitive Ad Filter.

 

Mainly e-commerce sites that are happy to advertise related markets but do not what adverts showing for direct competitors.

There's also a lot of cr@p out there and I have an ever growing list of advertisers that I don't want on any of my webistes

 

I use it to block unwanted ads from appearing on my site.

 

I have used it a few times.

Once to stop my main competitior from advertising and once to stop a Gay website for advertising. I got so many complaints from my forum members about the Gay banners that I had to remove them immediately, the only problem is that it takes a few hours to stop them

 

hmm, i have the same question also but i apply it although it lowers the earnings.

 

It raises earnings by filtering out low paying ads.

 

yes, thats true so what do you propose ?
or what do you make for your sites ?

 

If I have a website that has an article about website usability that uses the word "menu" one time, I don't want to see some spammy diet ad. If, and that's a big if, that ad actually does pay more than the ads that match my content; it doesn't matter when no one will click on it.

I've rarely used the competitive ad filter to ban competitors. Just about every site in my list was targeting words that had absolutely nothing to do with the page it appeared on or were stupid like "Buy North Carolina on ____".

 

But every time you block certain ads by using filters, you are bound to get a notice from google which says that you are likely to earn more by keeping the filtered list to the minimum. I tried to filter a number of mfa ads being displayed in my site but that didn't make much difference. Now my filter list is zero

 

Some sites are mfa so I want to filter them, just don't want their ads appear on my site.

 

this is the best way to explain it...

 

For months I was filtering out MFA and low paying sites that directly target me.

I decided to unblock them, just to see what happens. As it turns out ...My site is popular, so legitimate advertisers seem to be bidding higher (and smarter) to outdo the MFAs.

 

I have a website where I offer game development courses. Obviously, I don't want competitor ads appearing in my website. Don't you agree?

 

@atladsenser:

Hope you got your answer! In summary, we use the Competitive Ad Filter to:

- prevent competitive ads showing when we are selling products on our site (example: the games dev. course site)
- prevent known low-paying ads from being shown (example: the $0.01 click ads ...)
- prevent irrelevant ads from being shown (example: diet ads on a site that contains the word "menu")
- prevent objectional ads being shown (example: the forum on which AdSense displayed gay ads)

But from our own experience, "your milage may vary" ... eg we have not found our AdSense income to be much different regardles of which ads we filter out ...

.S.

 

Sthman is right

Plus filtering those low paying ads can lead to increase in adsense earning

 

That's what I thought would happen, too, and has been my experience on my site. First of all, I don't know where you find the information that tells you for sure which ads are providing clicks of only 1 cent or 2 cents; second, it seems like it would be really easy to include URLs on that list by accident that provide good-paying clicks. And third, the more advertisers you have bidding for placements on your site, the better overall payouts you're going to have.

Just my "two cents"