Saturday, 19 April 2008

Working with the Ad Review Center

As you may remember, we started enabling the Ad Review Center for publishers back in December to let you review ads placement-targeted to your site. We've recently enabled the Ad Review Center for more accounts and will continue rolling it out over the upcoming weeks. To get a publisher's perspective on the new feature, we chatted with Richard Tribe, Director of ski.com.au.

Australian snow enthusiasts can visit ski.com.au to learn about resorts and travel deals, as well as news and photos of conditions. The site also serves as a skier community, with videos, forums, wikis, and several blogs. Richard has been using the Ad Review Center to ensure relevant, high-quality ads appear alongside his content. He explains that "the Ad Review Center allowed me to see who was targeting my site, and I saw a wonderful array of high-quality advertisers in there... The Ad Review Center is a great way of managing the quality and style of advertiser you would like to have associated with your publication."


To highlight specific inventory, Richard has turned his custom channels into ad placements. For instance, he found that his live camera feeds of snow conditions drove significant advertiser interest, so he created specific snow camera ad placements. He elaborates, "That extra choice helps make my site look more attractive and allows advertisers to place their ads exactly where they want to place them." With targetable custom channels, Richard has given advertisers more control over where their placement-targeted ads can appear, and using the Ad Review Center, he ensures those ads are relevant to his site's audience.

To check if the Ad Review Center has been enabled for your account, visit the 'Competitive Ad Filter' page under the AdSense Setup tab and look for a green notification box.

When setting up the Ad Review Center in your account, we strongly recommend you keep your review preference set to the default of 'Run ads immediately', and review placement-targeted ads after they have run. Ads don't participate in the auction while they are awaiting review, and ads that you have blocked can't compete in the auction either. We ask that you consider the revenue implications before blocking ads or switching from the 'Run immediately' setting.

Happy skiing (and reviewing)!