Module 3 - Exclusion Lists

Why do exclusion lists matter at all?

Because once your ads are running, you have the opportunity to stop paying for placements that are not working. Google will say you can exclude certain placements that do not match your brand, or placements that are not performing well for you, and it is the latter that really matters.

When you create a video campaign on YouTube and run it as an ad, Google will build that placement list for you unless you have built a placement list yourself.

How does Google decide where to show your ad?

If you choose audiences, keywords and topics, Google goes out and selects the placements for you, and those can be almost anywhere on YouTube. If you have used a particular keyword, once somebody has searched that keyword Google knows that person is now in an audience ready to be served an ad.

That person could then go and watch a video about anything on YouTube and be served your ad. That is how it works.

That is why it is not necessarily a great idea to build your video ad campaigns just on keywords. If I search "network marketing", Google now knows I have searched that. It will go and find a placement for me, serve the ad to me, and that placement then comes into the campaign as a placement chosen by Google.

That does not necessarily mean everybody else watching that channel is similar to me. They might be, but "might" is the key word, and that is the issue.

How do you make Google's choices better?

Overlay several parts of audience data across your campaign, so Google has to match two parameters instead of one. If you are going to use keywords, overlay them with topics, or with a custom audience, or with an in market audience. Then Google has to find people who have searched a particular keyword and who have also been on, for example, one of your competitor websites.

Take the example I have given in other parts of the course. If it is me, and I have searched for a particular make of golf club, and I have been on a golf retailer's website, and then I go and watch the golf channel, that starts to narrow down the fact that I am a lot closer to buying and being interested in a golf product than somebody who just searched for a particular golf driver.

What happens when your keyword is ambiguous?

You open yourself up to hundreds of placements that have nothing to do with your business. One of our clients sells stages, and when I say stages I mean a stage that an orchestra sits on. I do not mean a stage of the Tour de France, or a stage of an educational journey, or stage four cancer.

In that example, if I just built the campaign on keywords, I have opened myself up to tons of placements that are just not anything close to what I would want. If you look at the keyword modules in this course you will start to understand why it is so important to make sure your keywords are perfect and not ambiguous.

Hopefully the stages example shows you that the use of that one word could go across hundreds of different meanings. Is "performance stage" good enough? Is "stage for presentation" good enough? How would you start to refine that down?

Well, if we had "stages" as a keyword and we also had websites that had to be visited, meaning websites that sell stages that people perform on, now we are starting to say to Google, look, only these people. Yes, they have to have searched stages, but they also have to have been on these types of websites. That is a thousand times closer than if we were lazy and just used the keyword.

Where do you find the placements Google has chosen?

In the campaign, under placements and "where ads showed". Once you start overlaying audiences, Google produces the placement list for you, unless you are running a pure placement campaign where you have chosen the placements yourself. Later in the course there is a module on Vidnetics, where you can search specific videos and channels and decide whether you want your adverts to appear in that channel or not. That is a great way to do it.

On the other hand, if you choose audiences and keywords, Google will choose the placements, and then you need to be able to go in and find the ones that are not performing.

If I go into one of our clients, into their video campaigns, and then to placements and where ads showed, you get a list of all the channels and videos where your ads have appeared. Then you can see where your conversion events come in.

Can you judge a placement on one day of data?

No, and this is important. If you segment by conversion action, for this particular customer there is a conversion action here for yesterday. This channel, whose name is in a language I do not understand, produced a conversion of over 30 seconds on site from that particular placement, and the cost was only 13 cents.

Had I looked at that list and seen no conversions on that channel, I might have made the assumption that the channel was no good. But I cannot tell from a day's data. If I expand this to all time, I can start to see where many, many conversions come from, and which are the best channels.

How do you actually build the exclusion list?

Sort by conversions and look for the channels where you have spent money and had none. These are the lists of channels where we have spent money and had no conversions. Admittedly, on this particular list some of these have had very, very few impressions, but they have had no conversions and we spent money.

Over time we start to exclude these from our campaigns. You might want to exclude them purely from one ad group, or you can exclude them from a campaign. At that point you are building a negative list, a list of placements that we do not want to see Google serving. Google will then serve new placements and say, we will now give you a fresh batch.

If you do not do this exercise, and you do not go in and regularly exclude the placements that are not working, you are just spending your money. Yes, you are getting a level of conversion, and maybe your campaign is performing brilliantly. It can always perform better.

You can also go into exclusions and add particular exclusions that you do not want. You might not want to appear on a particular competitor's channel. You can also search using Vidnetics to build a list of keyword related searches and import a negative list here.

Who is actually using the device your ad appears on?

That is one of the other key things to think about when you build an exclusion list. If I am showing ads on mobiles at particular times of day, do I see kiddie channels, apps that are games, music? On this particular campaign we have excluded things like Garth Brooks and family toys. There is a whole massive list of exclusions here.

If any of you watching the course want an exclusion list sending over, I have got some quite big ones, I think some with a quarter of a million placements in them. They help us exclude the channels we just do not want to show ads into, because Google is not perfect.

Imagine a scenario like this. I use this PC today during the day, and my kids use this PC of an evening. Your customers may be the same. Google may think this PC belongs to me because I use it for the majority of the day, and it might therefore show ads aimed at me on this PC, or aimed at the content on this PC. My kids could be on here of an evening, going onto YouTube or other websites, and those ads could get shown to them. That is obviously a complete waste of time.

So excluding placements that are not working on a regular basis is just good housekeeping. It is like running normal PPC campaigns and going in to add negative keywords. This is adding negative placements and excluding channels where we do not want our ads to show.

What do you learn from the lists over time?

Themes. It is absolutely essential to understanding the data later on, because themes appear within the lists. We might make an assumption that if we are selling a marketing product, we want it to appear in other marketing channels. That is probably a fair assumption, and we can test it.

We may find that when people are watching other marketing videos and channels, people are not buying. Why is that? Maybe because they are interested in what they actually searched for at the time. Contrast that with finding that our marketing product sells well, or we get better engagement, when our ads show in news channels. We know that person is interested in marketing. They have been on other marketing websites, they have been searching marketing related terms, maybe they have even been on Google Ads or SEMrush or another marketing related product. So they are in market. Then they pay more attention when they are not actually doing research, when they are watching something completely different, because Google has categorised them correctly into an audience.

It is that sort of data that makes an absolute ton of difference to how your campaigns perform over time. This is how we need to think. Not too focused. Try and think outside of the box, and it is the data that will tell you.

The only way you are going to achieve that is by continually monitoring, removing the placements that are not working and understanding your audience. What you are going to get out of this course is understanding your audience. If you understand the behaviours, what they do and where the conversions come from, all of these pieces join together.

It is the marketeer who is not lazy, who comes on and does their exclusions and makes sure they are taking out the placements that are not working. That is where you narrow down, distil the audience, understand their behaviour, and are then able to spin up new campaigns that you know will work.

Hopefully that is really useful. See you in the next little piece of the course.