Adsense Unveils Ad Review Center, More Publisher Control

"This new feature, which we'll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site's users.When you first opt into the Ad Review Center, you'll be able to see all placement-targeted ads currently targeted to your site, and a couple of days later you'll be able to review placement-targeted ads that have previously run on your site. If you think an ad is not relevant for your users, you can prevent it from appearing again by blocking it in the Ad Review Center."

While Ad Review Center is a serious step toward giving publishers more control over the ads that appear on their sites the question is what about the portals in terms of ad relevancy. Let's say one website has almost 200 categories and it has made it's ad channels by ad placement location and size. Let's say the website covers health issue. The advertiser is advertising prostate cancer treatment and targets this website. Will that ad appear only contextually on the site or will that ad appear all over the site because the advertiser has targeted that channel which spans all over the site? You don't want to show Prostate Cancer Treatment Ads to those who are seeking depression treatment or obesity treatment.

It would be great if Adsense could address this question in the near future.

Coming back to more control given to publishers, Adsense says be careful how you block ads through Ad Review Center because advertisers may not come back if you keep blocking ads without good reason. However, Adsense gives two good options.

One is that you can give feedback as to why you choose to block that particular ad, which Adsense is going to share that feedback to advertisers so they can improve ads. This is very important and can help to combat Smart Pricing in a way that Advertisers will be getting feedback and prepare better landing pages, resulting in better consumer experience.

Second is that Adsense says you can always go to Ad Review Center and unblock previously blocked ads. This option is good as well because after a while when an advertiser has improved the ad it may be helpful to go back and check them and possibly unblock that advertiser's ads.

Indeed, the revenue will vary by site and also by industry. Adsense says when using the Ad Review Center to please "consider the revenue effects of blocking ads or switching from the auto-allow setting." It's interesting to see how "auto-allow" will work.

Adsense says Ad Review Center is coming in few months and publishers are looking forward to see the impact it will bring on the industry.