Advertisers Can Now Exclude Site Categories!
The newest Google update to the AdWords Tool Section allows advertisers now to exclude whole categories of web sites, rather than excluding individual sites, with the Site Exclusion Tool.This particular update also brought a new name to the game. It is called “Goodbye Site Exclusion Tool – Hello Site AND Category Exclusion Tool”.
How it Works
When Google uses their contextual targeting technology – real hi-tech stuff – to scan a page in the Google Content Network to find relevant ads to show, their bots also check if the content on the page matches any of the topics or page types you have set to be excluded in your Google AdWords Campaign. If there is a match between a category you’ve excluded and the page classification, your ads won’t show on that page. Google bots classify pages dynamically, so even as the content of a page changes your ads should be prevented from showing for categories you have excluded.
The Up-Side
This new revision is supposed to make it easier on advertisers to keep their precious ads out of sites where they feel the incoming clicks fail to convert to sales at a satisfactory rate.
The Inside AdWords Blog states that category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the Google content network both, keyword targeted and placement targeted advertising campaigns.
The Down-Side
Google already hopes that they haven’t shot themselves with one bullet in two feet and advertisers won’t use the new feature too heavily. The blog post cited points where the company feels category exclusion could easily be overkill.
The Google blog further states “Excluding a category could potentially block your ads from appearing on a number of relevant pages and severely impact your campaign’s performance. We recommend that you refer to the statistics provided in the Site and Category Exclusion tool before making any exclusion”.
I don’t think that many advertisers will buy these arguments. Category exclusion has been an often-requested feature. Advertisers who see that category exclusion has too much of an impact on their AdWords campaign will likely turn it off again.But once more; Google is looking to make our life easier and is doing a good job herein.
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Good post! I’m gonna try my hand at the google content network soon.
Nice post.Will try out the above mentioned.
Very informative. As an Adwords advertiser I am happy to read that Google has my interest at heart.
I love the way Adwords allows you to tamper with each individual criteria. I wish more venues allowed the depth that Adwords provides. Its a shame that most other PPC and PPM don’t offer things like this.
Thanks for the insight into category-based site exclusion.
I doubt Google is too nervous about adding this feature though, as most advertisers will never use it.
It’s too bad, because it’s a great tool.
Thanks again.
When working with a charity I found this to be very useful, they wanted to be absolutely sure that their adverts would not be visible on any websites that would disagree with their ethics and category exclusion worked a treat!
Woo! Guess will have to try out your suggestions!