Many of you budding millionaires who use Google AdSense will want a preview of the ads available for (or already showing) on your blog. Authorizing third-party ads on your website is always a crap shoot. Being upset by a link is bad enough, but what worse atrocities lurk at the linked site?
If you’ve read all the AdSense legal fluff, you’re aware that clicking on your own ads is forbidden, verboten, nicht, a no-no of capital measure. Google’s AdSense Preview Tool addresses this problem. It’s a simple registry key that adds a contextual (right-click) menu in Internet Explorer that offers a few tools to preview available ads and advertiser sites. Well and good if you’re an Internet Exploiter fan; I’m not.
A quick search turned up this old post describing how to use the AdSense Preview Tool from within Firefox. The article is simple to follow and works with one caveat: the link for the IE Tab Add-on has changed. Other than that it seems to work fine, only throwing an occasional script error. Be aware that since the Preview Tool is a registry change, you’ll need to restart your computer (or perhaps logoff and log back on) after installing.
Good Ad Hunting!