When we are advertising with Google Display, our ads can appear in various placements. Wherever websites/blogs/applications have set up partnerships with Google, your ad banners can appear there. This is great for exposure, but you don’t want your ad to appear in irrelevant places because it will be an ineffective spend, especially when budgets are limited. So what you can do, which is similar to what you do for Search Campaigns negative keyword: review your placements and remove the irrelevant sites.
Now, as you may head to your placements dashboard to review, you may realize it’s a daunting task, with the many sites and places that your ad appears. This is especially true if you’ve been running your display/Youtube campaigns for some time. When you audit your placements, you may not recognize half of them, and often, there are plenty of placements where your ads show even if they don’t really make sense based on your targeting selections. So here is a list of items that you can employ to help you exclude irrelevant placements:
- Content Exclusions
- Topic Exclusions
- Keyword Exclusions
- Placement Exclusions
1. Content Exclusions
Depending on the industry and the type of product or services you offer, it can be crucial to avoid sensitive topics. Even if you don’t require it, it may be a good idea to do so. What you want to do is going to the left navigation bar. You will then find settings > account settings > excluded content & excluded types & labels. If you observe the screenshot below, you see the option like “tragedy and conflict”, which means Google won’t show your Ad on content related to these to avoid being associated.
2. Topic Exclusions
Next up is choosing topics to exclude. Websites, Blogs, and Apps in general cover particular topics. This is useful if you know your target persona’s interest, then you’ll be able to exclude the irrelevant issues to your target audience’s persona. For example, you’re advertising for an e-learning course. You might want to exclude topics related to gaming. Or perhaps, the political situation is charged, and you don’t want your brand to appear supporting a particular side; you can exclude politics as a topic. To do this, go to the left bar navigation menu and select settings > topic > selections.
3. Keyword Exclusions
Next up is keyword exclusions, which you can reference the one you did for your search campaigns. Hopefully, you’re staying on top of your negative keyword game for your search campaign! Next, what you need to do is find keywords on the left navigation bar, select negative keywords, select the campaign and ad group, and enter the negative keywords you have prepared.
4. Placement Exclusions
After getting the 3 steps above out of the way, it’s time for you to review your placements. Here are some tips for you to sift through your placements list in a faster way instead of checking them one by one:
- Export your placements list so you can easily filter them
- Filter out irrelevant placements
- Placement with a different language than the one you’re targeting
- Placement names that are clearly irrelevant to your product/service offering or your target audience’s interest
- Placement with domains that’s irrelevant to your targeting (e.g. .gov or .nz if you’re not targeting New Zealand location )
- Filter out placements with poor performance
- High CPA
- High cost but zero clicks
- High CTR with no conversion
- Filter out irrelevant placements
- Create a negative placement master list that you can use across all campaigns, where the placement is known for low performance, spammy, foreign, etc.
- Leverage other people’s list, readily available and shared on the world wide web. Here are a few to get you started:
With these placement optimizing tips, you should be able to cut down on some junk and improve your Google Display ad performance. If you’re interested in more digital advertising performance tips and information, you can check more blog articles here.
