Question as I'm quite new to Adsense. I've just opened a new website & forum about a football club. I'm running ads, and they are all based around a city 12 miles down the road (hotels, tourism etc etc). Problem is, they are our most hated rivals and it makes me / the site a laughing stock to be serving those ads. I've looked at the competive ads filter but that appears to be only for urls and specific sites, nothing on block anything with the world "abc" in it. Can anyone help? Thanks.
LOL. That's a pretty interesting problem you got there. Well, there isn't any mechanism provided by ADsense for you to block the type of ads you want to block, but you can help Adsense provide better ads by using various techniques such as section targeting. See more about that here: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168 But remember that the reason you're getting a lot of ads for your hated rivals is because they, apparently, either have more money than businesses in your town, or their town has more advertisers than your own, so you may not be able to get rid of them. But give section targeting a try by highlighting ads about YOUR town. Could help...
Thanks for the suggestion. I don't seem to have a problem on the html pages on the site, they serve footy ads and related stuff. The forum is the problem, and because i've hacked phpBB2 to serve the ads in a similar fashion to Shawn here, I can't get any of these tags in, because the ad code is in .tpl files and there is no html to read. I don't want to take ads off the forum, but I'd rather lose the revenue than have Jester Shitty all over my Forum! If anyone wants to take a look at what I'm talking about it's here: Wrexham FC, and look at the forum section. Thanks. Edit: I should add that it's actually one word I am trying to ban. The name of a city. lol. Edit 2: It seems "keyword filtering" is what I'm looking for and Adsense doesn't do it yet. Final Edit: I've managed to solve this problem in the short term by blocking a bunch of URL's, editing the meta tags of the forum and stuffing the footer files with football related words. This seems to have gotten rid of them!