Don’t forget about the AdWords category exclusions

Hidden within your AdWords account, there is a little known section called the Site and Category Exclusion tool.

Within this section you can exclude specific sites or categories of sites from displaying your ads on the content network.

Adding site exclusions has been around for some time, and they can be added from within the AdWords Editor as well as the AdWords web interface fairly easily.

Category exclusions aren’t new, however the ability to add them is hidden away deep within the new AdWords interface.

Here is how you can find them:

1. Click on the Opportunities tab.
2. Click on the more tools link on the left hand side of the Opportunities page.
3. On the Tools page, you will find a section called Site and Category Exclusion.

Once in this section, you need to pick the content network campaign and then choose the types of page categories you would like to exclude. You can finally get rid of all those pages that look the same and perform poorly in one sweeping action.

There is only one catch. Right now it seems like there is a bug in the system. Some categories with no clicks are reporting conversions in some of our client’s accounts. Google support are looking into this issue and hopefully it will be fixed sooner rather than later.

It does appear that Google are working on a new way to deal with the category exclusions, however I am not so happy with the new method. It is also hidden away in the new AdWords interface.

Here is how you can find it:

1. Choose one of your campaigns which targets the content network.
2. Click on the network tab.
3. Scroll down to the section for exclusions.
4. Within that section there are two columns: Ad group level and Campaign level.
5. Under the Campaign level section, you can click on the button for Add exclusions and you will see a drop-down which will have an item for excluding categories.

The problem with this new approach is that it contains no conversion data. So if the category for “Crime, police & emergency” or “Juvenile, gross & bizarre content” are driving a lot of clicks, you will not know if you should or shouldn’t exclude them since there is absolutely no conversion data. It is very odd that they did not include that information.