Module 3 - Excluding parts of the App Store

Why would you exclude the app store from your video campaigns?

Because getting conversions from the app store can be, let us say, challenging at times.

One of the things we are going to want to do occasionally is exclude certain parts of Google and certain places where your ads, and particularly your video ads, are shown. One of the common exclusions we like to use is parts of, or the entirety of, the app store.

The issue with the app store is that there is scope for ads to go all over the place into many, many different apps. Whether you believe Google has got complete control over that yet is a different matter, because you have got, for example, Apple using their privacy settings, Facebook using different settings, and Google with their own cohort audiences. We seem to be in a time now where all of this is in flux.

Where do you set the exclusions?

Under placements in your video campaigns, then exclusions.

When you are in your video campaigns, go down to placements and then choose exclusions. From there you can add exclusions, and you can either add a placement exclusion or a placement exclusion list.

If we are going to exclude from the entire account on this basis, you can go down to app categories or individual apps. If you choose app categories, you can see the app store there, so I can start excluding parts of it. If you were to go through and click all of these, you could exclude the entirety of the app store.

Just be careful though. If I click here, can you see that games has got 19 in brackets? You do need to open that up. If I want to exclude all of the games categories, I can do that by clicking through all of these. I think if you go and click every single one, currently there are 141 different placements within the app store that you could choose to exclude. Going through here will stop your ads popping up in app.

Which app categories are worth excluding?

Music is always a good one, because someone listening to music is typically not really going to engage with ads.

If you are going to use placements within the app store, I would strongly suggest you choose very carefully which ones you do, because it is very hard for Google to categorise apps into specific parts of the app store. As an example, CRM systems come under business productivity, so it is not really clear.

As you can see, I am starting to build up my app exclusion list here and I am just going to go through and do them all. All you have got to do is go and tick all of these boxes. You can create this as a global exclusion list from your account, so if you choose to exclude from certain other campaigns you can either use or exclude that list.

Within Google Play there is a list here of art and design. Remember that Google's Play Store is different to the iOS store, so just go through here, and remember to click your drop downs, because otherwise you are going to see ads popping up in games and things like that.

What should you do instead of running ads inside apps?

Run your ads in in-stream, discovery, YouTube display and the Google network, without going into the Google partner network and the app store, then split out and run some tests into very specific app categories.

I have not seen anyone really getting placements within the app store to work as well as I would like within Google. I have actually had more success creating custom audiences that match users of particular apps. When you are creating a custom audience, you can choose users of an app, and very specific apps.

For example, we run a very successful weight loss campaign for a client, and one of his audiences that works well is weight loss apps. Rather than choosing fitness, health and weight loss within the app store, we created a very specific app audience.

How do you build a custom audience of app users?

Go to tools, audience manager, custom audience, create a custom audience, and choose people who use these types of apps.

I will quickly show you how to do that. First I am going to save this list, so that is going to exclude all of those apps and app categories.

To create an app audience, go to tools, audience manager, then custom audience, then create a custom audience. Let us call this apps related to, and this particular client is network marketing, so it should be interesting. I have not tested this in advance, so let us see if it will work.

Choose people who use these types of apps, then go in and type network marketing to see if anything comes up. Scroll down and look: network marketing leads, network marketing prospecting, network marketing, network marketing pro.

Obviously we do not know how many users each of these apps have, but if you can go through and pick out very specific apps, do a bit of research and find out what the most popular apps are that work around your topic. That will create a list, and then you can save that as an audience. That then gives me a new audience of apps related to network marketing.

I am not saying I have created enough at that point. You do a bit more research and add a bigger list of apps. I would rather you created audiences of people who are using the apps than served the video adverts into the apps themselves.

Hopefully that is useful, and I will see you in the next little piece.