Module 11 - Channel and placement exclusion lists

What are you looking at when you open placements?

You are looking at every channel and placement your campaign has run on. This is a little part of the course where we are going to show you how to manage placements within your campaigns. This is one of our internal test accounts, a new campaign that has been running a week or so and is starting to get some impressions, views and clicks.

Within your video campaigns, if you click on placements you can click where your ads showed. You can then see a list of all the placements within your campaign, and these are the channels. In this campaign we have got a total of 4,000 placements.

How do you read the view rate column?

Sort by view rate and look at both ends of the list. Let us say we are going to work on the view rate. We click on view rate, and we can see some of these channels have got a 100 percent view rate. Go to the other end of the spectrum and there are a lot of channels that have not been tested yet. They have been chosen by Google and are yet to serve our ads into them, so we do not want to play with those placements.

Why download the list to a Google Sheet?

Because you can see a lot more detail in one view than you can looking at it in Google Ads itself. You can download this entire list, so download it to a Google Sheet. It takes a couple of seconds, because it is a fair bit of data.

Now we can open the sheet. Say we want to look at where we are getting lots of impressions but very few views. That would be a signal to say that channel is not necessarily performing for us.

How do you sort the sheet?

Sort by impressions, largest to smallest, after telling Sheets that you have got a header row. I am going to take out the top couple of lines and then sort the sheet by impressions. Go to data, sort range. We need to say the data has a header row, which I have now screwed up because I sorted it. If we just do control Z to get it back to where we were, we all make mistakes.

Here we go, we will sort it again. Data, sort range, data has a header row, and we are going to sort by impressions, largest to smallest.

Which channels should you exclude?

The ones taking a lot of impressions and giving you nothing back. Now we can see the channels where we are getting most views. Here we have got, for example, a channel called Sidemen Reacts, whatever that is, and on that channel we have had 33,000 impressions, 444 views, a view rate of 1.3 percent. Average cost per view is 3 pence, and no conversions as yet. I will just move myself out of the way, because you cannot see that.

In this total account we can see that our cost per conversion at the moment is 7.67 pounds. As I say, it is learning at this point. But where we see a particularly low view rate and a conversely higher number of impressions, you might see that as a bad signal. It depends whether you have had some conversions or not.

Let us say we are not happy with this first set of channels. I am going to scroll down, and my rule in this instance is that if a channel has had more than 500 impressions and no conversions, I am going to exclude it. So I am going to copy this list.

Obviously there is a myriad of different ways you could organise this data. Choose the basis on which you want to exclude. You might just look at any video that has had, for example, more than 100 views and no conversions, so that would be a less than one percent conversion rate at that point.

How do you add the exclusions in Google Ads?

Paste the list into exclude placements, then click the add multiple placements button before you save. Take this list of the channels we are not happy with and go back over to our Google Ads interface.

Within this particular campaign, where ads showed, I can click on exclusions. There are already a few exclusions within this campaign. Click exclude placements. We are going to exclude them, and select the campaign that we are in. At this point we are actually viewing our entire list of campaigns, so I am going to exclude these on an account basis, because I know that this account is all about the same type of content.

You can go and exclude individual channels, particular videos, websites and apps. You could exclude the entirety of the app store if you went in here and started picking individual apps or types. In this example we are going to enter multiple placements, so I am going to paste my list in there. I have now got that list of maybe, I am guessing, 100 to 200 placements.

What is the step people miss?

You cannot just click save. The add multiple placements button on Google tends to try and disappear. Maybe they will sort that out if somebody from Google watches this course. If you click here, it is going to go and look for that list and put them all over here. One of them has not been added. It probably does not exist any more, that channel, that is why. Then we click save.

We had 7,821 when we started, and we have now got 7,917, so it was just about 100 placements that we excluded. They have now been added to the list. Hopefully that shows you how, if you want, you can go and exclude channels from your YouTube campaigns.