During February the Times published a damning article about Google. There have been some serious allegations that advertisers’ content has been mistakenly published on unsavoury or extremist websites. This has resulted in a number of high profile brands putting their Display ads on hold in protest.
Google have promised a review of their policies and procedures and in the meantime here’s 3 best practices to minimise the risk of your adverts appearing on such sites.
- Check placements
This should be a vital part of your regular Google account checks. Within your AdWords campaign dashboard simply navigate to the Display Network tab, click the Placements tab underneath and here you’ll see a complete list of the domains that your ads have appeared on.
- Exclude placements
After completing the above, should you spot anything suspicious – exclude it, and if necessary report it to Google. Simply tick the box to the left of the irrelevant placement, click edit and exclude. This placement should then appear at the bottom of this page under Campaign placement exclusions. Alternatively you can upload in bulk by clicking the +exclusions tab.
- Exclude site categories
As a final note, every time you configure a new Display campaign get into the habit of amending your Site category options. Only a few of these are excluded by default, and you’ll need to add options like sexually suggestive, parked domains etc.