How To Block Flash Ads In Google Adsense

Most if not all people using adsense generally know about the competitive ad filter. It can be used to block your competitors ads showing on your site, block low paying CPC advertisers and to block irrelevant ads showing. The last reason is why i needed to do this. I had ads that had absolutely nothing to do with my niche showing (Call it bad keywords or bad content, i needed them out). You should probably already know how to block text ads using googles ad filter, If you dont well, heres the run down :

1. Get the destination URL by right clicking the ad, going properties, and then finding the landing page URL.
2. Add it to the Competitive Ad Filter on your Adsense Dashboard (AdSense Setup –> Competitive Ad Filter)

And well thats pretty much it. Do note when adding your URL you probably want to be as broad as possible. Even if the specific landing page is www.site.com/landingpage.html, put “site.com” into the ad filter to basically filter out anything that this site might put up.

However we run into a problem when we are serving image/flash ads. You see you cant view the properties of flash ads, therefore you cant exactly get the destination URL. You can click on the ad to find out, but it certainly isnt advisable and is against adsense TOS. Google also has a IE tool that allows you to view the ads that might be served to a page (Including destination URL), but they choose only to serve up text ads through this. So still we are stuck with the problem of not being able to find the destination URL, thus not being able to filter out the ads.

Well it actually came by complete accident, While trying to learn/improve my web development skills (including javascript) I downloaded a Firefox addon for debugging. It was FireBug, you have probably already heard of it. It can do some pretty cool stuff, but ill keep it within the scope of this post. So what you want to do is :

1. Open the page that displays the ad in question.
2. Along your menu up top, go Tools, Firebug –> Open Firebug (Or you can just press F12 )
3. Going from the top left hand side of the Firebug window, there should be a picture of a bug (Go figure), and then a picture of an arrow on top of a box. Click this.
4. Next just click on your flash ad, and wallah the code for the flash is shown.
5. The destination URL should be the very last part of the “flashvars” parameter. Generally you can pick it out due to the URL being on the ad anyway.

You then just add the URL in exactly the same way you would if it was a text ad. It can take up to a few hours, but generally it should disappear from your site pretty quickly.