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Competitive Ad Filters - What? Why?
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What do they do?
Competitive Ad Filters, or just Filters for short, are the mechanism pubCenter gives you the publisher to block ads.

Why would I use them?
The original intent of filters is there in the formal name for them: Competitive Ad Filters. They were created as a way for you to block advertisements from your competitors. For example, if you were a florist, you wouldn’t want to see ads on your site from other florists in your area.

This may still be your primary usage of them. However, as you probably have already discovered many publishers are using them to block ads that they don’t want to see on their site or aren’t perceived as relevant. For example, if I was running a food related website, I might choose to block ads about cars because I don’t think they are relevant. Or, I might block weight loss ads because I don’t think my users of my site want to see those ads, even if they might be relevant to my food web site.

Will filters affect my revenue?
The short answer is “Maybe.”

The long answer is it really depends and there isn’t any way to know until you try it. If you don’t have any competition that you are trying to block and all you want to do is maximize your revenue then you shouldn’t need to create any filters. To quote Kevin McCabe, “Microsoft is building a new marketplace for both publishers and advertisers with the goal of helping publishers achieve competitive yield and helping advertisers see better performance from their ads.” The marketplace can’t be a success unless we are trying to make you more money.

By adding filters you are reducing the number of advertisements that are available for PubCenter to pick from for your site. If any of these are ads that we would have chosen to show on your site and that your users are likely to have clicked on, then it could be reducing your revenue. I say “could” because it still depends on the rate your users would click on the ad, how much the advertiser is paying for the click, how often we would show the ad, how those metrics compare with similar metrics for other ads, and other factors.

On the other hand, PubCenter is still in beta, there is the remote possibility that we aren’t choosing a good value ad to show on your site. Adding a filter to block this type of ad would have the potential to increase your revenue. But rest assured we still have the same goal as you: maximizing your revenue. We aren’t making any money from the ads on your site unless you are making money from them.