If you have ever created Display campaigns in Google Ads, you might have noticed that lots of placements are YouTube channels and videos. While it may be relevant for some businesses, other companies may just as well flush the money spent on that down the toilet. In this post, I will show you how particular YouTube videos, channels or all YouTube placements can be excluded from display campaigns.
Table of Contents
Check if your ads are shown on YouTube
If you’re not sure on which sites, apps and channels your display ads are shown, you can see that in the Placements report. Choose the campaign or ad group you’re interested in and navigate to Placements -> Where ads shown:
Exclude YouTube channels and videos
You already know where placements are, so you can look through them and choose on which channels you don’t want to show your ads. Copy the URLs of the channels, then navigate to Exclusions -> Exclude Placements (click a pencil icon to get there):
there is also an option to exclude certain videos:
Note: If you need to exclude only a particular type of channels, it’s much harder. For example, here is a guide on excluding children’s channels as placements.
Exclude YouTube entirely
If you don’t want to show ads on YouTube at all, you can exclude it as a placement.
Placements -> Exclusions -> Search for ‘youtube.com’ -> Choose ‘Websites’ -> Add youtube.com to exclusions
Don’t show your ads in live streams and in-video
This option includes not only YouTube but also other video channels. If you need to proceed with this, you’ll need to edit categories.
Go to Settings -> Additional settings -> Content exclusions -> Check “livestreaming + in-video”
Final Bricks
GDN placements can be tricky, especially when it comes to YouTube. But the good news is that there are some options to control these placements. Of course, it would be better to have more flexibility around that, but Google is being Google, so you should be clever with placements on GDN.
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After 10+ years in SEO, I founded MarketingSyrup Academy where I teach smart SEOs. Over 500+ people have gone through my courses, including SEO Challenge and Tech SEO Pro.
I’m also a creator of the SEO Pro extension with 30K active users worldwide.
