Adsense competitive ad filter is terrible - The Adsense competitive ad filter is honestly a piece of crap product that Google should be ashamed of.

It works like this: when adsense shows ads which are either competitive or irrelevant to your site (which happens all the time) you can put them into the Adsense competitive ad filter so Google will stop displaying them. Sounds good in principle, but in practice it is terrible.

Firstly, the only way to input the URLs of the ads it to download a clumsy program called AdSense Preview Tool which only works for IE. That tool outputs the URLs of the ads.

Secondly you have to cut and paste those ads into the Competitive Ad Filter. Fine, but for some reason the Competitive Ad Filter only takes 64 character URLs - but almost ALL of the stupid URLs are over 64 characters! So you have to manually delete all the extra characters.

Thirdly, you have to wait at least a couple hours to see if it works. And it only works about 75% of the time! And now I have so many blocked competitors, I never know whether I'm adding a site that has already be blocked or not and I have to go back and delete the duplicates.

Basically, Google either doesn't want you to use the Competitive Ad Filter or did a terrible job of designing it.