Google Content Exclusion Beta

Posted on December 2, 2007
Filed Under adwords |

Over the last couple of days I've spent a fair amount of time reviewing, building out, reining in and generally musing over Google content network campaigns. Content can work very well for all sorts of advertisers, albeit at smaller volumes than search. It just needs a lot of tweaking to get it right.

One of the most important tweaks is looking at where the traffic is coming from; which sites on the network are the thoroughbreds and which are the mongrels. Google then allows you to exclude the mongrels from your campaign with its Site Exclusion tool. The big G is trying to expand the functionality of that tool with Content Exclusion Beta. It's a good step in the right direction but still lacks some core functionality that sophisticated advertisers need. (In fact all advertisers need the functionality, it's just that only the sophisticated ones know it.)

There are reviews elsewhere on the web that give a good overview on the beta (try RedFly Marketing). One of the options is to exclude 'Domain Ads', i.e. content network (and sometimes search network) ads that appear on parked domains.

The problem is that excluding Domain Ads wholesale is not necessarily a good idea. They can work extremely well but they can also work very badly. How do you throw out the bath water but keep on to the baby?

Google makes life very difficult for you there; take this example. One content campaign I was analysing had a large proportion of low quality clicks coming from searchportal.information.com according to the referrer logs, so I added it as an excluded site. The traffic still came. Excluding information.com didn't fix it either. And the really weird thing was that the referrer didn't appear in any placement reports.

Some research told me that some domains need to be blocked at the partner level, which in this case is domainsponsor.com. It appears all over the placement report like a particularly itchy rash. I added it to the site exclusion and the poor traffic has finally stopped.

Although a tool like content exclusion is welcome, it's far too blunt. Google needs to be a lot more open about exactly where domain traffic is coming from. If it wasn't for people like Richard Ball at Apogee Web Consulting, who seems to be leading a one-man crusade, how would we know about this?

So come on Google, help us to help you. Let us know exactly what traffic we get and exactly how we exclude it. Otherwise more and more advertisers will simply switch off Domain Ads altogether.