Announcing beta test of expanded category blocking

Last year we launched sensitive category blocking in order to give you more control over the ads that appear on your sites by letting you opt out of receiving ads that fall into potentially sensitive specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re beginning to test a related new feature called general category blocking with a small group of publishers. General category blocking will allow you to block even more categories of ads from appearing on your site. We’re testing this feature with 170 more specific categories, including finance, travel, job, and automotive. This feature will allow publishers to block up to 50 ad categories from among a broad range of 170 fine grained categories. To help you understand potential changes to your earnings, we’ll provide you with the percentage of your total revenue and total impressions that fall under each category.

General category blocking will initially apply only to ads in English, regardless of the language of the site. We are working on expanding it to other languages in the future.

This feature is available in the new AdSense interface, which is currently in beta and being tested by a limited number of publishers.



Although we're not able to expand this test to additional publishers at this time, we wanted to give you a glimpse into one of the ways we're working to give you even more control over the ads that appear on your site. Over the coming months we’ll be working hard to refine this feature so that we can roll it out more broadly in the future. Please stay tuned to the blog for any updates, and feel free to leave us a comment in the meantime.

Posted by Atul Bhandari - AdSense Product Manager