You can Now Exclude categories

[Discovery]

Get busy, you can now identify your placements and exclude them by category

More control over where your ads appear
You can now exclude certain categories of webpages in the Google content network with the Site and Category Exclusion tool.

Story developing...

Discovery

[Discovery]

For a first run at it they have done a pretty good job.

The allow you to exclude sites based on

Network types
and
User Generated Content

You can also exclude based on TOPICS such as
Conflict and Tragedy
and
Edgy Content

I know this is just the start, but cant wait until you can do the reverse and target these sites by category... or by vertical?

[abbottsys]

Yes, I noticed this. It's extra cool because it's a start on the critical Content Network Segmentation project that we've mentioned here several times, most recently in the "Content Network - Wish List" post.

The Content Network is Google's secret weapon, no other search engine comes anywhere close in matching it. So, the more control, transparency and measurement they can give advertisers in this area the better. The more control an advertiser has the more they will spend.

Finally, lights are being shed into the Content Network black box. A great start. Superb that Google is listening and acting. Hats off to them for that.

[AdWordsRep]

I'm really pleased to see positive comments so far. I'm pretty jazzed about it myself.

I thought you might be interested in knowing that his was posted about on the Inside AdWords blog a couple of hours ago, right here.

(First link above is to the blog main page, btw, while the second link is a permalink to the Category Exclusion post itself.)

Rest assured, I'll pass your comments (whether positive, not-positive, or somewhere in between) along to the right folks, as I typically do.

I've already done so, in fact, a short time ago - and got to see a big grin in response to the three comments so far.

AWR

[chris1]

Finally!

I had seen this in beta but was not available for me yet. Already (in one day) this has cut my content spend in half!

[Discovery]

A few Preliminary comments:

First and foremost I will say again, this is very satisfying to see Google come out with more ways to refine our ad network. Good for the advertiser good for the publisher.. and lets not forget the searcher..

Sticky Dates:
The date for applying to the past campaign performance does not stick from adgroup to adgroup, much less campaign to campaign. It’s time consuming to keep resetting it.

Stats:
The statistics for Error and Parked domains within the web interface are greatly different than those found in my placement performance reports for the same date range. The Web interface report being far smaller than the Google report.

Interesting:
Parked domain performance across all of our client accounts is LOUSY. This will save and our clients many thousands each month.
Error pages on the other hand turn out to be low to average volume but excellent conversion rates!

Requests:
I know you just came out with this tool, and its early for a wish list, BUT...

Page types:
Sometimes you can drop a full category without concern. However, many times segmenting the category is necessary to see if there are anomalies skewing the group. It would be nice to be able to drill down on this category to pick and choose.

Forums are an easy example: We don't want to be on get rich quick forums, or our competitors forums, but we do want to be on legitimate high trafficked forums. Eliminating all of them is a tough decision.

Also, over time the make up of some of these categories will change. YouTube started out mainly being a collection of practical jokes, jackass and fart lighting videos. It has obviously grown to the point where the millions of video's themselves can and will be categorized in to tightly focused groups. We have to be careful that when they ARE categorized that you notify us so we can review our exclude lists and readjust when necessary.

Same is true for Social Networks:
LinkedIn - Good
MySpace - A bomb
Next month a Social network appears that targets our vertical and we're opted out.

Overlap or conflicting selections in Topics and Page Types:
I opt out of Juvenile in Topics but keep Social Networks in Page Types. In my view MySpace and YouTube fall under both, which one wins?

Content Evaluation:
What is evaluated? Are there strict interpretations such as Video only, Image only, or text only, or is it evaluated by everything found on a page, a website? Could a report on a local news website about a sexual deviant arrested pull them into the sexually agressive category and thus get them excluded from running our ads? Could a social network with user generated content be business related one month and military/international conflict the next depending on the issues being discussed by its members?

Discovery

[AdWordsRep]

Discovery - many thanks for the extensive feedback. Very much appreciated.

As luck would have it the Advertiser Feedback Report that I send out each Thursday was delayed this week, and will be going out later today - so I am now featuring this thread and including a link to it in the report. Any feedback here will be seen by quite a number of folks at Google - so additions are most welcome.

I'll also personally pass the feedback along to a colleague who is just a stone's throw away - and deeply involved in the development of this tool.

Thanks again!

AWR