We’ve all felt the pain of doing placement reviews. There are often so many placements where our ads show even though they don’t make sense based on our targeting selections.

Especially if you’ve had Display or YouTube campaigns running for some time, it might be worth doing an audit of your settings to make sure you have excluded everything as appropriate for your business. If changes have been made since you set-up your campaigns, some defaulted settings may not help your campaigns. I’m going to walk you through some ideas to help make sure you’re excluding everything you should.

Double-Check Your Campaign Settings

Content Exclusions

In your campaign settings, review your exclusions. Depending on your products or services, you may especially want to exclude every category in the middle column. You can also narrow down more based on the maturity level Google assigns for the placement/channel (note a perfect system but helpful).

Add Exclusions

Topics Exclusions

You can exclude topics at the ad group or campaign level, which can really help refine where you don’t want your ads to show. To exclude a Topic, go to Topics, then Exclusions in the left navigation bar. Below is an example of where you can find a topic like “Politics” (shown below) to exclude if you want a little extra assurance that your ads won’t show on anything politically oriented. Another one to consider is “Games.” Keep sorting through the topics and you’ll potentially find…