Get to grips with Google Ad Placements

In the world of PPC, mastering Google Ads placements is a key lever for improving performance. That means ensuring placements align with your brand, optimising spend, avoiding spam and navigating targeting limitations. Read on to find how you can tackle these challenges and improve your ad placement management

Introduction

The world of PPC doesn’t stay still for long. Whether it’s new strategies, tactics, tools, or experiments, there’s plenty to keep you busy. That’s why many of us love it. PPC professionals love to dive into the details, investigating and analysing as we work to get the best from our campaigns. PPC and Google Ads novices and veterans alike understand that the details matter; they drive incremental performance improvements, and each increment adds up.

It makes sense that we PPC professionals like control over the details. It’s our responsibility to spend our company’s, client’s, or own budgets as effectively as possible. That means placing ads on the right channels, at the right time, in the right places… and by that, I mean the right ad placements, specifically Google’s.

Control over these ad placements has been eroded recently as Google reduces advertisers’ powers over the ads platform and campaigns. Why are they doing this? I’ll leave that up to you to decide, but given recent high-profile issues—*cough questionable practices and lawsuits cough*—it’s no surprise that the PPC community isn’t always impressed with the resulting limitations.

Let’s do our own diving into the details here…

What are Google Ads’ placements and why do they matter?

Placements are spaces where your ads can appear. In the Google Ads ecosystem, that means across websites, apps, and videos on the Google Display Network, YouTube, and—as of March 2024—the Search Partners Network.

Advertisers like you and me work to ensure that our ads appear in the most relevant placements to get the best results for our campaigns. We’ll discuss how to do this later.

It’s important to keep track of where you’re ads are showing and optimise these placements for several reasons, including:

1. Brand representation: ensure your ads are showing on websites and videos that align with your brand and avoid showing alongside inappropriate content.
2. Campaign performance: identify and optimise for the best-performing ad placements, ensuring your spending is as efficient as possible.
3. Spam reduction: with over 2 million sites on the network, there are plenty of low-quality placements available. Reduce your exposure to spam traffic.

 

Find out where your ads have shown under the ‘Insights and reports’ section in campaigns on the Google Ads platform:

 

How do you manage ad placements?

Placement Targeting

Ad placement targeting allows you to specify the website, videos, channels and apps where you want your ads to show (as long as they’re part of the YouTube or Display Network). This gives you the highest degree of control possible over ad placements but is resource-intensive – it’s a balance to ensure the effort pays off. These settings are now found under the ‘Content’ section of Google Ads.

Pros:

• The best way to guarantee your ads are showing on the websites, videos and apps that you (or your client) want.
• Control bidding on specific sites and pages to maximise the performance at a granular ad placement level.

 

Cons:

• Placement targets can’t be added at the account level, and you can’t create lists to share across multiple accounts. This means it’s still a manual process to set and edit targets.
• Researching and compiling target placements is a time-consuming process; new accounts will likely need to run without a target set to start with and gradually add to it.
• Highly relevant target placements do not guarantee good ad viewability, so there’s still work to be done: for example, your ad may be placed below-the-fold.

 

 

 

Placement Exclusions Lists

Creating placement exclusion lists lets you quickly exclude these destinations from campaigns across your ad account. Setting up these lists at the account level or from your manager account provides a centralised set of negatives to apply to relevant campaigns.

Pros:

• Exclude up to 65,000 placements from your accounts
• Share lists across your child accounts from the manager account level
• Reduce admin by uploading/scheduling negative placements from a Google Sheet
• Take advantage of scripts to keep your placement exclusion lists up to date

 

Cons:

• Manager accounts can only have up to three placement exclusion lists
• Different country domains need to be entered separately
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Content Suitability

Navigate to ‘content suitability’ under settings, and you’ll find ‘excluded placements’ under ‘advanced settings’, alongside controls for sensitive content, types and labels, themes, and keywords. Excluding placements here will exclude them from all campaigns running on YouTube, Display and the Search Partner Network.

Pros:

• Adding negative placements here excludes them from all relevant campaigns in your account, saving you from adding them to your exclusion lists or at the campaign level.
• Allows you to exclude placement categories at the account level (for example, mobile apps)

 

Cons:

• Requires you to add the placements manually, which can still be time-consuming, especially if you are doing this for multiple ad accounts.
• The UX makes it difficult to identify any errors that result in errors, particularly when you could be adding thousands of URLs, channels, or IDs at a time.
• Google doesn’t let you ‘select all’ in a category (e.g., all Apple App Store apps), making it a manual process to exclude those unsuitable for your ads.

 

Remember, when excluding at the account level, leave off the ‘www.’ to exclude all connected subdomains and subpages, not just the root domain.

 

 

Campaign & Ad Group Exclusions

Are lists, settings, and targeting research too heavy-handed for the nuances of a particular campaign? You can still exclude specific placements at the campaign and ad group level. This is beneficial when purposefully avoiding cross-over between campaigns and ad groups in similar segments. Watch out for the technical limitations discussed below.

Key Limitations

We’ve established that staying on top of ad placements is important, and you can control these in several ways. However, there are also limitations; here are three things to look out for when managing your campaigns:

Relevancy

Google provides limited information on why placements have been selected, this means there’s a lack of overt guidance on what changes to the targeting are needed to avoid showing on these low-quality or irrelevant sites.

Do not underestimate how wrong the algorithm can get this. Think broad match keywords but for websites. Your keyword, audience and topic targeting is important, but the scale of the network means there’s plenty of spam-heavy placements available.

Layering Targeting

Adding target placements is the surest way to guarantee quality ad slots for your campaign. However, it’s important to be aware that adding additional targeting layers can compromise this as Google does not view these as combined ‘AND’ conditions but as ‘OR’ conditions.

This means combining in-market or alternative audience type targeting into ad groups where you use target placement allows Google to select which audience it uses and prioritises. I recommend segmenting ad groups by audience type so you can monitor this.

Bulk Exclusions

One seemingly small but frustrating limitation is the inability to bulk-exclude placements from specific campaign types directly from the placement insights report.

For example, when working on a Demand Generation (formerly Discovery) campaign to bulk exclude placements, you need to export them, add them to a list, import them back to the platform and then assign that list at the correct level—a convoluted process for what should be a simple operation.

I’ve raised this with Google support, sadly to no avail…

 

Actions

Although we don’t have the sway to make Google address ad placement’s limitations and issues, all is not lost. Here are five key actions you can take to stay on top of your ad placements:

1. Check those reports! If you’re hands-on with campaigns, schedule time to review where your ads are showing regularly and exclude low-quality placements.
2. Build robust centralised exclusion lists where possible, with different team members or accounts contributing low-quality placements they find. Set these up at the MCC level.
3. Do the inverse: build targeting lists over time with high-quality and relevant placements for your products, clients, and verticals.
4. Take advantage of automation where possible to reduce manual updating, such as syncing lists from sheets. However, you’ll still need to update content suitability manually.
5. Look into scripts to help you stay on top of placement management and enhance the detail you can report on (especially for PMax).

 

And with that…

It’s impossible to cover every feature of, use case for, or limitation of the Google Ads platform in one blog; there’s plenty to complain about just on ad placements. However, everything is not lost, and staying on top of these details remains important. Take advantage of the tools available to monitor, test and optimise your Google Ad placements. Doing the basics well consistently improves performance – so stick at it.