Category Exclusion for the Content Network

We've updated the Site Exclusion tool to give you more control over where your ads appear on the Google content network. It's now called the Site and Category Exclusion tool, and it allows you to exclude certain categories of webpages from your content network campaigns in addition to excluding individual sites.

If you find that you're repeatedly excluding many sites of the same type, either to optimize for the content network or to further control your campaign's exposure, using category exclusion can be a simpler way to control your ads' visibility. Category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the content network: keyword-targeted or placement-targeted.

Here's how category exclusion works: when we use our contextual targeting technology to scan a page in the Google content network and determine relevant ads to show, we also check to see if the content on the page matches any of the topics or page types available for exclusion. If there is a match between a category you've excluded and the page's classification, your ads won't show on that page. We classify pages dynamically, so even as the content of a page changes your ads should be prevented from showing for categories you've excluded.

Before using category exclusion, it's important to consider the following points:

• All sites in the content network are already required to comply with Google's AdSense policies. Several levels of review are in place to detect that pages in the network comply with these guidelines. However, some advertisers have requested the ability to avoid additional types of content that don't meet their advertising goals, and we've released category exclusion in order to provide this control.
  
  
• Excluding a category could potentially block your ads from appearing on a number of relevant pages and severely impact your campaign performance. We recommend that you refer to the statistics provided in the Site and Category Exclusion tool before making any exclusions. Keep in mind that a low clickthrough rate on content network pages is not necessarily an indication of poor performance, especially if your goal is to maximize ROI. Further, your ads' clickthrough rate on the content network does not affect your quality score, minimum bids, or position on Google.com or other pages in the search network.
  
  
• While webpages are categorized to the best of our technology's ability, excluding a category does not guarantee that you have excluded every related webpage. If you see that your ad has shown on an undesired webpage, you can exclude that page by adding the URL through the tool's Sites tab.

Category exclusion is our latest tool to give you increased control over your content network campaigns. If you are looking for additional insight and flexibility when advertising on the Google content network, we encourage you to check out CPC bidding for placement targeting and Placement Performance reports.

Posted by Trevor, Inside AdWords crew