I wrote this with my team to give advertisers a new way to control ad spend on the display network.<\/p>\n
Ways To Save Money On Google Ads<\/h2>\n
Advertisers are always looking for an edge over their competition, and a good way to unlevel the playing field is to spend less for the same results. That means finding and eliminating wasted ad spend.<\/p>\n
Common ways to eliminate wasted spending are to add negative keywords, restrict match types, and add negative placements.<\/p>\n
Here is how you go about each of these techniques manually:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Add negative keywords<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 Find ideas by scouring your search terms reports for ideas.<\/li>\n
- Restrict match types<\/strong> \u2013 If you\u2019re not using automated bidding, play it safe with your keywords and rely more on exact and phrase match than broad match.<\/li>\n
- Add negative placements<\/strong> \u2013 Look at automatic placement reports to find non-converting placements that eat away at your budget.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Finding Placement Exclusions For Google Ads<\/h2>\n
The web is growing fast, which means there are more places every day where your ads may show when you participate in the Google Display Network (GDN).<\/p>\n
There are over 36,000 apps added<\/a> to the Apple App Store every month, and there are over 250,000 new websites<\/a> launched every day. While they don\u2019t all join the GDN, with this level of growth, it is challenging to keep up with placement exclusions.<\/p>\n
Unless you want to play a constant game of whack-a-mole and manually review new placements as they come into existence, you need to identify trends that correlate with low performance and use technology to help eliminate traffic from those types of placements.<\/p>\n
Google provides several ways to proactively prevent GDN ads from appearing<\/a> in places you don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n
Exclusions can be based on:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Sensitive topics<\/strong> \u2013 such as pages about tragedy, conflict, or sensational news.<\/li>\n
- Digital content labels<\/strong> \u2013 similar to movie ratings, but for sites.<\/li>\n
- Video content types<\/strong> \u2013 such as live streams or videos embedded outside YouTube.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The script shared in this post provides another way to exclude placements.<\/p>\n
While it can\u2019t proactively prevent all impressions, it can add a negative placement as soon as a new placement is detected in the automated placement report.<\/p>\n
Placement Reports<\/h2>\n
The script analyzes details of all placements in the placement detail report.<\/p>\n
This is the query you can use with GAQL<\/a>, the Google Ads Query Language, to find placements:<\/p>\n
SELECT detail_placement_view.display_name, detail_placement_view.placement, detail_placement_view.placement_type, detail_placement_view.resource_name, detail_placement_view.target_url, detail_placement_view.group_placement_target_url FROM detail_placement_view<\/p>\n
The data might look like this when you export it to a Google Sheet:<\/p>\n
![\"Placement](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/money-saving-placement-exclusion-script-for-google-ads-via-sejournal-siliconvallaeys.jpg\")
Screenshot from Google Sheet, October 2022<\/span><\/div>\nNotice the placement on line 12 in the screenshot uses the Arabic script for the name of the video.<\/p>\n
That is what this script will look for and add as a negative placement.<\/p>\n
If your language uses a non-Latin script, you would simply change the settings and allow your ad to show for a placement like on line 12 and exclude all the other ones that use the Latin character set.<\/p>\n
Language Targeting On GDN<\/h2>\n
You might wonder why advertisers wouldn\u2019t simply use language targeting to prevent their ads from showing next to content that uses a different script in its language.<\/p>\n
The problem is that when you target a language, it\u2019s not a very strict criterion. A user will match the targeted language as long as they have interacted with an app or website in that language recently.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t mean they must be viewing a site or video in that language when your ad is shown.<\/p>\n
Google says<\/a>:<\/p>\n
\n
\u201cOn the Google Display Network, Google Ads may detect and look at the language of pages or apps that someone is viewing or has recently viewed, to determine which ads to show.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So if a user just reads a few English webpages with Latin script but spends most of their time reading sites in Thai script, they may still see ads targeting English.<\/p>\n
This script fixes this by making targeting more strict.<\/p>\n
It gives advertisers extra control, and that\u2019s usually a welcome thing in the age of ever-more automation from the ad engines, something I wrote a whole book about this year.<\/p>\n
Unicode Character Targeting With A Google Ads Script<\/h2>\n
In a similar vein as language targeting, you can use ad scripts to detect when an ad is shown on a placement with a title using a different Unicode character set and exclude that placement from ever showing your ad again.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what the script does.<\/p>\n
It finds instances when your ad is shown with a video, app, or website whose content is in a different character set than the one you want.<\/p>\n
The script then excludes placements whose names are not in the desired character set.<\/p>\n
E.g., a placement with the title \u2018\u0627\u0646\u0634\u0627\u0621 \u062d\u0633\u0627\u0628 \u062c\u0648\u062c\u0644 \u0627\u062f\u0648\u0648\u0631\u062f \u0645\u062c\u0627\u0646\u0627 \u0644\u0644\u0645\u0628\u062a\u062f\u0626\u064a\u0646 \u0648\u0637\u0631\u064a\u0642\u0629 \u0631\u0628\u0637\u0629 \u0645\u0639 \u0627\u0644\u0642\u0646\u0627\u0629 Google Adwords | \u0643\u0646\u0632 \u0627\u0644\u0631\u0628\u062d \u0645\u0646 \u0627\u0644\u064a\u0648\u062a\u064a\u0648\u0628\u2019 is using the Arabic script rather than the Latin character set, and can be made a negative placement.<\/p>\n
Use this technique with caution, though.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing necessarily wrong with showing your ad to users whose language is in a different script. For example, they may be seeing your ad because they got onto your remarketing<\/a> list and are, in fact, a very good lead.<\/p>\n
So how does this ad script find placements using non-Latin characters?<\/p>\n
- Digital content labels<\/strong> \u2013 similar to movie ratings, but for sites.<\/li>\n
- Restrict match types<\/strong> \u2013 If you\u2019re not using automated bidding, play it safe with your keywords and rely more on exact and phrase match than broad match.<\/li>\n