PPC Blog by Gordon Choi

Effectively optimizing Google Adwords content targeting campaigns does require the separation of search and content campaigns, the implementation of conversion tracking, and the use of placement performance report. If you have been paying for excessive traffic with low conversion rate and are hoping to improve your campaign ROI, the following site exclusion methods should also be considered:

Site and Category Exclusion

The Site and Category Exclusion Tool can prevent individual sites or categories of web pages in the Google Network from showing your ads. The exclusion tool works only on the campaign level and you will have to go through each campaign when setting up this tool. There are 3 major options: Site, Topics and Page Types.

Site:

The Site option allows you to import a list of sites for exclusion and you can enter the URLs in the following conventions:

To exclude the whole site:
www.alibaba.com

To exclude the entire sub-domain:
importer.alibaba.com

To exclude the single page:
www.alibaba.com/sitemap/sitemap.html

To exclude the entire directory:
www.alibaba.com/buyeroffers/importers

You do not need to exclude a site just because it is located outside the target region for your ad. This is a common mistake. No matter where a site is located, your ad will be shown only to visitors who are located in the regions you have targeted. For instance, if your ad is targeted to Germany, your ad will be shown only to users in Germany (based on their IP address) even if the site in question originates in a different country.

Topics:

The Topics option allows you to exclude one or some of the topics given:

1. Conflict & tradegy
* Crime, police & emergency
* Death & tragedy
* Military & international conflict

2. Edgy content
* Juvenile, gross & bizarre content
* Profanity & rough language
* Sexually suggestive content

Web pages are categorized based on Google’s defined web page categorization, so in some cases ever when you have excluded a category it does not necessary guarantee that you have excluded every related web page.

Page Types:

The Page Types option lets you to select the web page types that you want to exclude:

1. Network types:
* Error pages
* Parked domains

2. User-generated content
* Forums
* Image-sharing pages
* Social networks
* Video-sharing pages

IP Address Exclusion

The IP Address Exclusion Tool simply allows you to import a list of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses for exclusion. Currently, this tool only allows you to include up to 20 IP addresses or blocks or IP addresses.

Demographic Bidding

You can also use the Demographic Bidding Tool as an effective site or web page exclusion tool, if you are running site-/placement-targeted content campaigns (instead of keyword-targeted content campaigns).

Posted in: Adwords, Contextual Advertising, Google, PPC