Google Ads Content Suitability Settings & Controls

Google Ads Content Suitability Tool is a new section within Google Ads that allows advertisers to better control which environments their Display and YouTube ads could appear on. Now the settings within this section are going to look pretty familiar because they used to exist within the campaign creation process for Display or YouTube campaigns.

Recently, Google has made a few changes that allow everything to be controlled at the account level, so you don’t have to do it every single time you make a campaign. So we’re going to show you where the Content Suitability Tool lives within your site as well as how you can still control certain exclusions at the campaign and ad group levels.

I’m in the Paid Media Pros demo account, and the first thing we’re going to cover is where you can find the Content Suitability Tool. In order to do that, let’s go to Tools and Settings. In your top navigation and right below where my mouse is in the setup column, you will see Content Suitability.

And if you’ve already run a YouTube or Display campaign, this is going to look pretty familiar because in the past part of the campaign set up for Display or YouTube in some of the additional settings was controlling the inventory type. Now, because of where my mouse was, I accidentally clicked on limited inventory.

But the default and recommended option in Google’s eyes is going to be standard inventory. But to really explain what will be excluded within each of these inventory types, we’re going to start with the most broad option, and that’s expanded inventory. This will cast a wider net and not try to scare anyone too much, but this setting gives your ads the most opportunity to appear on certain sensitive content.

It’s not everything because if you see the three bullet points towards the bottom of this block, Google will still exclude extremely sensitive information like too much profanity, graphic sexual content and nudity, and graphic violence and serious injury. Now some of those topics I just mentioned can be caught ahead of time, like graphic nudity, graphic violence.

A lot of those videos, if they’re caught by Google, are automatically pulled from YouTube. That’s because Google can control that type of content that’s their property display might be a little bit harder, but websites can be removed from Google’s display network if they violate their policies.

Take it with a grain of salt. I’ve seen a lot of placements where a lot of my display has shown up, and stuff can definitely get through Google’s policies. However, if you choose expanded inventory, the odds of you showing up on some sensitive content is going to be higher than the other two inventory types.

Now, standard inventory, which I already said is going to be the default and recommended option when you first head on to the content suitability tool, is going to use the same exclusions as the expanded inventory, one that we just covered, but they’re going to be a little bit more aggressive on what type of profanity they’re going to exclude.

They’re also going to be a little bit more conservative over sexual content, innuendo discussions of anything sexual, and a little bit more aggressive on blocking out violent acts, as Google says, whether it’s real or dramatized. And then the most aggressive form of content exclusions is going to be the limited inventory type.

Let’s say you have a YouTube channel that’s suited for kids or a very family-oriented business YouTube channel, display campaigns, whatever. This is going to be the option that you would want to choose. It’s going to exclude everything that we covered in the expanded and standard inventory types.

But limited will also try to exclude a majority of profanity as well as any moderately suggestive sexual content. Now, Google says in this highlighted section right here, they’re going to do the best that they can, but especially on the YouTube side, there is so much content uploaded every single minute to YouTube, they can’t catch everything right away.

So it’s still going to be good to look at your placement reports and get a better understanding of where your ads are showing. That is a task that should not go away just because they introduced this new tool.

But to make things easier, you can look and compare the inventory types, and Google gives some specific examples of what would be included or excluded, depending on which option you’ve chosen for your account.

The first row is a good one to go over because while limited inventory did say that it would exclude a vast majority of profanity, the first row tells you if it’s used in a non-hateful, comedic or artistic way, they’re going to let it slide. That’s exactly why I said it’s still important to check out where your ads are actually being shown.

If you don’t want your ad to be shown on any placement or YouTube video where there is any profanity, you’re still going to have to check on that and then add those exclusions yourself. Same thing with the fourth-row limited clothing, romance, kissing. People are going to have different opinions on how sexual those sorts of actions are, and that is still included within the limited inventory.

And there are plenty more examples if you scroll down on how Google is categorizing certain things in terms of profanity, sexual acts, as well as violence demonstrated within the video or the content, and then not within the main page.

When you compare inventory types, Google is going to show you the ad safety promise where these four rows of content are going to be excluded from all inventory types. And this goes to what I said earlier, where a lot of the stuff might actually be pulled from the channel.

But even if some of these examples don’t violate actual Google policies and they’re allowed to be run on YouTube, your ads will still not show up on this type of content. I don’t really want to read what they’re about or cover them completely. You can head to the Content Suitability tool, click on the Compare Inventory Types button and look at that yourself.

But in my case, I’ll leave it as limited. And then, if you do change the inventory type, don’t forget to save it. Now, besides inventory type and that closed out, we see additional options at the bottom. And these are additional settings for sensitive content types and labels, content keywords, and excluded placements. Let’s go through each one first with Sensitive Content!

If you look under the excluded Sensitive Content title, it says this is for all campaigns running on the Display Network except for video because, yes, you can run video ads on the Display Network. Let me just check the first one for Tragedy and Conflict.

Just think about a mindset of users in the sad state of certain parts of the world where there are wars going on. Ask yourself do I want my brand to have an ad on an article possibly related to the war? Or do I want a video ad showing for my brand for maybe a news article about something very sensitive or a big tragedy?

I’m going to say most likely you don’t. Even if it is applicable to your business in some way, people might perceive that you’re trying to take advantage of a certain bad situation, and that can make your brand look bad.

So certain content on the Display Network is going to be bucketed into these types of categories. So you can exclude tragedy and conflict, sensitive social issues. We know how polarized things are now, excessive profanity in rough language, which hopefully would be covered more by the inventory types above, sexually suggestive and sensational, and shocking.

So it’s going to be up to you and your brand to see which ones you may want to check off for your Display campaigns. So I’ll save this one, and then we can look at excluded types and labels. Another setting that was also part of the initial campaign setup, this advanced setting will be available for both YouTube or Display Network campaigns, but this one will let you choose the content label, pretty much looking at the maturity level of your audience as well as content type.

And this is where YouTube categorization can come in that wasn’t available in the Sensitive content area, and I look at content type more in terms of placement. Going back to the family example, think about a YouTube channel like Sesame Street. Probably don’t want Elmo or Big Bird showing up for anything mature. You may want to consider excluding that.

On the flip side, what if you’re a big streaming business like HBO? You have a lot of adult content. You don’t want kids watching it. You may want to exclude the younger audiences to make sure that you’re only showing to the older ones. That can also be better controlled with some of demographic and age targeting.

I know someone’s going to call me out because, yes, you can watch Sesame Street on HBO Max, but you get the point. In content type, you can choose to exclude your ads during any live stream events. Embedded videos because, yes, your embedded videos pretty much live in the Iframe, and you don’t know where that Iframe code is going to be pasted because, within your view stats, you’re only going to know which video your ad is placed on, not necessarily where that YouTube video was embedded.

So while the video placement itself could be acceptable, maybe the website where the video was embedded is not acceptable for your brand, and you won’t be able to know that. So if that lack of information is concerning, you may want to consider excluding embedded YouTube videos from your targeting.

And then there are options for below the fold for Display and in-park domains for search, but that’s most likely an old setting from the original campaign setup that they haven’t updated because they did say this content tool was for Display in YouTube. So I’m just going to save the setting.

Next, we can look at excluded content keywords. This option is another one available for YouTube or Display network campaigns, but content keyword exclusions will prevent ads from showing on specific YouTube videos, YouTube channels, websites that have specific words in their titles and descriptions. And Google says that you can exclude up to 1000 content keywords.

You would just click on the Blue Plus button to start adding new keywords, and there we see we need to put one per line. There are just a few examples that could be controversial. I’ll click Save, and you can keep on adding them.

Look at this as an account-level exclusion that could apply to any of your YouTube or Display campaigns. This is a good proactive thing to do right off the bat before even launch any campaigns, just to make sure you’re getting as clean of a start as possible. And then next, we have excluded placements.

I already have certain placements, excluded everything you see that’s already excluded over 1000 YouTube channels that’s from a different video, and you can check that one out right here. That’s how we can exclude all kids YouTube channels, something you still may want to do, but hopefully, a lot of these inventory-type exclusions help make it easier, so you don’t have to do it one by one.

Here’s another good section where you can look on proactively adding specific YouTube channels, videos, display network websites, apps, and app categories as exclusions. One thing we typically do right off the bat, because we don’t see a ton of value for it for our clients, would be excluding all app categories.

It’s a lot easier to do within Google Ads Editor, and we have another video on how to exclude all the app categories. You can check that one out here, but if I head back to the main categories, type in a specific word. Now, you probably thought I was going to type in something a little bit more sensitive than football, but exclusions don’t have to always pertain to sensitive topics.

Let’s say I’m a business that is promoting specific baseball products, but maybe in some of my Display and YouTube campaigns, I’m casting a wider net, going higher level, and just targeting generic sports topics, channels, videos like that. Now, generic sports categories I can pretty much guarantee will also include people who like all kinds of sports, not just baseball.

So I can proactively try to go research specific YouTube channels, websites, videos, apps that talk about football, exclude them ahead of time, and do that for any other sport besides baseball to try to make sure that those more generic campaigns are keeping it to baseball themed topics as best as possible. That’s a very specific example, but it is another way that you can better control where your YouTube and Display ads are being shown.

Again, it doesn’t have to be just sensitive or profane topics, and as always, you’d want to save your changes. So that is what you can do within the Content Suitability tool. That being said, I want to cover one more thing. So to do that, I’m going to head back up and go back to the campaign view.

So everything I showed you from the Content Suitability section is going to be used. Thinking about the account level, any display or video campaign that you create will use all of the exclusions that you have set up within the Content Suitability section. And in case you’re asking, yes, we still do get control of individual exclusions at the campaign and ad group level.

So for whatever reason, if there is a campaign that you’re okay with profanity but a different campaign that you’re not, you should not use the Content Suitability tool. You should try to control that at the campaign level as best as possible. Right now, you see, I have display campaign selected.

You would then want to go to Content and then head down to exclusions. Now not too long ago, Google changed this view, and I think it’s extremely confusing because initially, it looks like you can only add topic exclusions, but you can change it. You just have to notice that teeny tiny little arrow next to the title is a drop-down.

And here’s where you can add in individual placement exclusions or content keyword exclusions. If I click here, it’s showing me the one exclusion we set up for our demo account. Most likely, I don’t have any keyword set up, no, because they haven’t really run anything within our demo account.

So just understand that you still get that individual control even though it’s harder to see. I don’t care if you’re doing expanded inventory or limited inventory. It’s always important for your display and Video campaigns to review where your ads are being shown.

If you click on any of the placement links, it’ll open up in a separate window, and whether the topic is sensitive or not, we’ll see. The first one is about war. I may want to go back up to the Content Suitability Tool, update those settings, and if it’s still not being caught by whatever settings you have, just understand you can still select those items and exclude them from your campaigns or ad groups individually.

I know last week, I released a video on how extensions are now going to be called assets. You can watch that one here if you missed it. But in that video, I mentioned how I like the idea that they’re taking certain things you had to do every single campaign setup and making it more universal at the account level, and this is just another tool that falls within that category.

It’s still important, but most likely, you were using the same inventory type settings for all of your campaigns anyway, so now it’s much more efficient to do it at the account level and then tweak things individually at the campaign level if you have to.

I know Google can make some decisions and changes that scare a lot of people, but so far, everything that they’re doing to make the campaign process and management easier and more efficient, I’m always on board with. If you have any other questions on how to use the Content Suitability tool or want more ideas of potentially what to exclude, just ask us in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez