Did you just get a pop-up from a.adsmktng.net and ask yourself where it came from? Did the a.adsmktng.net ad appear to have been launched from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the a.adsmktng.net pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s how the a.adsmktng.net pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the a.adsmktng.net ads. So don’t flame the people that owns the web site you were at, the ads are almost certainly not coming from that website, but from the adware that’s running on your machine. I’ll try help you to remove the a.adsmktng.net pop-ups in this blog post.

Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the a.adsmktng.net pop-up on one of these lab computers.

a.adsmktng.net resolves to the 54.244.235.229 IP address. a.adsmktng.net was created on 2013-12-18.

So, how do you remove the a.adsmktng.net pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the a.adsmktng.net ads I had PriceHorse, Salus, PriceLess, OfferBoulevard and Browsers_App_Pro installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the a.adsmktng.net pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, a.adsmktng.net is getting quite a lot of traffic:

It seems that the the site started getting some major traffic in December 2014.

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

To remove the a.adsmktng.net pop-up ads you need to check your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the a.adsmktng.net pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something suspicious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the a.adsmktng.net pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to track down and remove the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time deciding if a file is clean or unsafe in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the a.adsmktng.net ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!