In setting up an AdWords display campaign, it’s always exciting to know that our ads will be shown on hundreds, if not thousands, of 3rd party websites across the web.

Most people have the belief that the more websites our ads have been placed, the better.

Truth is, this is really not the case, and we will get to that a bit later.

Your Display Ad Placements

The websites where our ads appear are called “Placements”. With Display or Remarketing campaigns, our ads are displayed on various websites in Google’s network of websites.

For instance, if we run an Automatic Placement report, we can see which URLs or domains our ads are being shown on, and clicked on.

This placement report will tell you exactly WHERE your banner was placed – what URL it was on.

And the truth is, not all placements are good placements.

A couple of classic bad placements are:

• ads on unrelated mobile apps (that usually get inadvertent clicks)
• ads on a news article which is reporting on a tragic incident. For example, as shown below – here this article is reporting on a tragic drowning, and the ad above is telling me to “feel good” with Lite n’ Easy. Not good.

 

Although we only want our ads to be shown on relevant sites which include our product or service, default campaign settings are not enough to block unwanted impressions from irrelevant websites.

The good news is you can add in Placement Exclusions to prevent your ad from showing on such placements.

How to add Placement Exclusions

Since it would take time and continuous report generation to identify which of the hundreds or thousands of websites being shown by the report are irrelevant. Imagine going through 1000 domains and checking if each website is relevant or not.

Under the “+ Targeting” button, you’ll see an array of settings and exclusion options.

You can now enter all of your research URLs or domains that you wish to exclude your ads from showing on.

In our agency we have a HUGE list of negative placements we add to all our accounts that we manage.

We have also made it available to the members in our PPC Academy.

So, no need to watch out for these irrelevant sites every week, just upload the list to your campaign and you will save tons of hours going through each websites.