Excluding placements in the Google Display Network (GDN) isn’t just a hygiene tactic—it’s a strategic lever for improving ROI and campaign efficiency.

GDN Placement Exclusions

Google’s AI-driven placement algorithms are continuously improving. Right now, though, they still lack the nuance to fully understand brand suitability or the nuanced goals of a specific campaign. That’s why the proactive exclusion strategies we detail below are important.

Start by considering the context in which your ads appear. Certain websites or app categories—such as mobile games with accidental clicks or sensationalist news sites—may technically deliver impressions, but they rarely contribute to meaningful engagement.

Looking at your placement reports clues you into patterns that you can take action on: high impressions with low conversions, unusual CTR spikes, or bounce-heavy traffic sources. These indicators often point to placements worth excluding.

Audience intent is crucial. Even on high-traffic, reputable sites, your ad might not belong if the user’s mindset doesn’t match your offer. For example, placing a B2B SaaS ad on a recipe blog won’t align with user expectations, regardless of the domain quality.

Brands with international campaigns should also consider cultural and legal sensitivities. Some domains or categories might be legally acceptable in one country but damaging in another.

GDN exclusions aren’t set-and-forget. They’re part of a feedback loop. Make it routine—monthly at minimum—to review your placements and performance metrics. Couple this with developing your own dynamic exclusion list, informed by your brand’s specific needs, vertical trends, and prior campaign data.

Background on the Google Display Network

With more than a million websites across the globe, the sheer size of the Google Display Network is one of the main reasons why display and retargeting campaigns are such strong marketing tools. Spanning myriad topics and interests, reaching a target audience based on what matters to them has never been easier.

A high-performing campaign leverages the Google Display Network by serving highly targeted ads to users somewhere across the mammoth network of websites and publishers. Odds are, if a user is seeing a display or retargeting ad, they are seeing it on a website in the GDN.

However, there are thousands of websites with which brands do not want to be associated. This is why it’s a good idea for advertisers to consider blocking or excluding certain websites for placements of their ads on the Google Display Network.

Why Exclude Some Websites on the GDN?

It may seem counterintuitive that blocking placements on some websites would lead to better campaign performance, but there are instances where blocking placements can be extremely beneficial. There are two main reasons why advertisers should exclude websites on the Google Display Network.

1. Spammy, Inappropriate, or Unrelated Websites

Considering how large the Internet is, it’s pretty clear that no matter what a person is interested in, there is likely a large community and hundreds of websites dedicated to that interest. This covers a gamut of topics from the very wholesome to the very “adult.”

Advertisers probably don’t have the luxury to consider and evaluate every single website on the GDN. That would take hours. But serving ads on a spammy, inappropriate website (or one that’s just not very related to your brand) can have unintended consequences. For example, say a butcher shop sets up a display campaign, and several of its ads are placed on websites whose audiences are passionate about the vegan lifestyle and animal rights. Not a great match.

2. Saving Money on the GDN

Besides avoiding placements because of a mismatch for relevancy or inappropriate misrepresentations of a brand, the big reason for blocking placements on the display network is to save money. When targeting is dialed in and a retargeting campaign is set up correctly, advertisers can reduce costs by eliminating irrelevant websites.

Say that a SaaS software company runs a display campaign but they don’t exclude a whole ton of websites geared towards teenaged and college-aged gamers. These placements eat away at the ad budget, and they don’t contribute meaningful conversions to the campaign.

By eliminating a whole slew of such websites, advertisers leveraging the GDN can ultimately get more out of their campaigns with lower costs if they refine where ads are being placed.

How to Block Placements on the GDN

Seasoned digital marketers may know about website exclusions, but they can be easily overlooked by less-experienced users of Google Ads.

At the most basic level, placements can be excluded by opening your campaign in Google Ads and clicking on the “Placements” tab. From there, hover the mouse over the top navigation and click on the “Exclusions” tab.

Once in this new area, exclusions can either be selected by website, YouTube channel and video, app, or by entire app categories.

It’s important to keep in mind that Google Ads’ exclusion tools don’t cover every website worth excluding from a campaign, and there are thousands it will miss.

Using an exclusion list can be a mighty weapon for any digital marketer working inside the Google Display Network — one you’ll want to come back to over and over again.

The Definitive Website Exclusion List (Free Resource!)

For years, Google Ads professionals have either had to resort to creating their own exclusion lists or borrowing lists of URLs from fellow marketers.

The team at Direct Online Marketing has created the exclusion list to end all exclusion lists.

This list is the culmination of our two decades as an agency running campaigns for clients in Google Ads. (To supplement our internal list, we also took every list of website exclusions we could find online and compiled it all in the above Google Sheet.)

At a stunning 70,000+ website URLs, this list is quite comprehensive as it covers such categories as dating, mobile, gaming, quizzes, sports, and more. And hey, it’s free!

Because this list can be found as a shareable Google Sheet, we encourage you to share this with anyone who would find it useful.

Notes About High-Cost, Low-Performing Categories

If you’ve taken a look at our list, you’ve probably noticed how we broke out several website categories.

High-Cost, Low-Performing – One of our categories addresses a large number of high-quality and reputable websites and publishers (such as The New York Times, CNN, etc.). We’d generally recommend excluding or considering blocking placements on some of these sites for direct advertisers. The placements may make sense if you’re using GDN just for brand awareness and reach. Because exclusions can be a good method of keeping ad costs down, blocking placements on high-quality websites can help stretch budgets a lot farther.

Key Takeaways About Google Ads Placement Exclusions

• Excluding placements on spammy, inappropriate, or unrelated websites helps maintain brand integrity.
• Advertisers can exclude placements directly in Google Ads so that ads reach their intended audience.
• Blocking select websites can improve ROI by reducing wasted spend on placements that don’t convert.
• Direct Online Marketing offers a comprehensive list of over 70,000 website URLs for exclusion.

Final Thoughts

Using the behemoth Google Display Network is how marketers are finding success with display and retargeting campaigns, but not every website is a good opportunity for advertising. By leveraging our comprehensive list of websites to exclude ad placements, advertisers can easily avoid the negatives of placing ads on inappropriate websites and reduce costs associated with their campaigns.

For those of you who share our vision in making this list the best it can be, we thank you and welcome any submissions.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 21st, 2025.

The post Google Ads Placement Exclusion List for Google Display Network (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

So you have to flip it over, with the overly inquisitive lady who’s a fixture of this drugstore eyeing you like a hawk and then you can finally print those photos of your dog in a lil cowboy hat.

Do you really always have the USB turned the wrong way around? Or is it just that things going wrong tends to stick in our memories better than things going right?

This is an example of sample bias.

Defining Sample Bias

There are many terms in this realm with overlapping meanings: sample bias, sampling bias, implicit bias. The essence of what I’m trying to say is that these terms point us to blindspots and the attendant difficulty in understanding the world. You might be interested to see this conundrum as it relates to sample bias in a census.

We’ve got one coming up in the US this year, you know.

Tempering our intuition with testing can combat sample bias. A common story that we tell ourselves about “experts” is that they gradually and imperceptibly develop a sixth sense about their field from years of lived experience. Now, this is true in a way, but the process isn’t so mysterious or impenetrable. Building expertise is often just running numerous experiments and changing your hypotheses as you get new data and test again.

And again. And again.

Sample bias leads to poor analysis and decision-making. It blinds us to the world that is right in front of us: we approach a situation without realizing the assumptions we bring to it.

Overcoming Sample Bias: Envisioning What’s Been Left Out

During World War II, the military tried to assess how to better armor its aircraft. Hundreds of planes coming back from the front were examined for damage, bullet holes mainly. This image of the plane on the right represents the data. Black areas signify more damage; white, less damage.

Where would you have recommended reinforcing the planes?

Pencils down!

Mathemagician to the Rescue

Luckily for the Allies, Abraham Wald was on the case. Wald was a mathematician who took on this very question for the US government via his post at Columbia University. (I learned about this nugget of history in WORK RULES!, Laszlo Bock’s book about why Google is consistently rated a great place to work.)

What Wald advised might seem counterintuitive: that the cockpit and tail should be reinforced. He had the clarity to realize that the data wasn’t presenting the whole picture. It only represented the planes that made it back. Those that were shot down were not being considered.

The prevalence of bullet holes in the wings, nose, and center section of the fuselage meant that those parts of the aircraft were actually more durable and less in need of protection. It was the cockpit and tail—generally unscathed on the returning planes—that were essential to protect. A single bullet hole in those vulnerable areas likely spelled disaster.

Sample Bias: A PPC Example

Let me bring sample bias a little closer to home, to us as marketers.

What I Assumed

I ran an experiment on the bidding strategy type for a client. It was a display campaign with the ultimate goal of driving brand awareness. The client had the campaign set to the maximize conversions bid strategy; I hypothesized that a viewable cost-per-thousand impressions bid strategy would drive more impressions for a lower cost. In fact, I didn’t just hypothesize it, I guaranteed it (in my head at least).

Why did I believe this so firmly? First of all, because that’s exactly how Google explains Viewable CPM—as an algorithm aimed at putting ads in front of people for less spend. Secondly, because that’s how my teammates expected the experiment would go as well.

Here’s what happened.

What I Actually Saw

1-week performance

I felt pretty good after the first week. The Viewable CPM strategy had gotten more than double the impressions of Max Conv.

2-week performance

Boy, about then I thought I was hot stuff. More than a quarter cheaper for each thousand impressions.

3-week performance

After another week, it was more of the same. I was going Mach 5.

4-week performance

The full month’s story was different. The average CPM ended almost exactly the same for each bid strategy, and Max Conv. got more than 17x the clicks in those four weeks.

I reviewed these stats with the client, and we decided to close out the experiment, returning the full budget to the Max Conv strategy.

I had to doff my cap to the wisdom of testing.

If I’d just gone with what I assumed to be true, I would have missed out on the excellent performance of Maximize Conversions bidding strategy in this case.

Sample Bias and Self-Perception

Correcting for bias in our thinking isn’t only good for PPC campaigns. It’s good for us as people.

Oh, no! FOMO

Fear of missing out—FOMO, as the kids call it—is intensified by the way we interact with social media. FOMO is that vague sense that everyone else is always doing something more exciting than we are.

Facebook and Instagram are pervaded by images of people indulging at fancy restaurants, hiking in perfectly appointed outfits, dancing the night away, starting new jobs, showing off new cars, and displaying especially good hair days.

Sometimes we take these images as the whole story. We implicitly assume that these photos are representative of the lives of those therein.

When you’ve gotten home late from work on a Friday night and pull out your phone, it can seem like everyone else is out having a great time, while you’re the lame one without the right relationship, without the right friends, without the right self.

The problem is we aren’t seeing the whole picture. FOMO is a kind of sample bias.

People usually use social media to share peak events. We don’t typically present others with:

• time spent waiting in the dentist’s office
• getting a flat tire
• anxiety about getting older

or the

• pleasant but ordinary half-hour spent reading before work
• our mother’s cancer diagnosis
• waking up and our back not hurting as much as yesterday
• having Cheerios just when you had a taste for them.

Correcting for Sample Bias in our Lives

When you are already feeling a bit down and turn to social media in your default mode of thinking, you can wind up making things worse. There is an opportunity in such moments to adjust your thoughts: to consider that sample bias may be at play. You are not getting the whole picture. And this can be consoling.

You can come to see the photos of people showing off a new car or being in an exotic locale as a respite for them amidst the misfortunes of life. You can realize that that person in the pixels is probably just as worried about missing out as you are. So why not bask in their moment in the sun, even digitally, from afar.

Keep Alert for Sample Bias and Things Will Be Better

We’re human. We bring assumptions to the table that we don’t realize. We start from a biased framework and get skewed results.

We’re human. We learn from our mistakes—and the keen-sightedness of others (my thanks to Mr. Wald). We check ourselves going forward for the many species of bias.

Ferreting Out Bias in Marketing and Life

• Are you considering the whole scope of the data? Or just a subset?
• Why is your direct traffic in Google Analytics so high?
• Are you invested in the outcome of a test going a certain way?
• Are you accurately tracking users across subdomains?
• Are you using tests to balance your gut feelings?
• Does alt text still matter?
• Are emotions pushing you to a negative conclusion that’s unwarranted?

Happy hunting for those hidden assumptions and unrepresented data! Check out how we’ve seen things that others missed for our clients.

The post Sample Bias: Personal and PPC Pitfalls appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

There are multiple ways you can get an ad banner placed online.  Here are three:

Direct Banner Buys

The most common form of banner advertising is doing a direct buy.  You find a site where you think your offerings can do well and you pay said site to appear there.  There are many pay models for this type of buy, including flat fee, cpm (cost per 1,000 impressions), pay per click, and pay per acquisition (the most super duper awesome kind, but also the scarcest).  This type of buy is definitely not paid search.

Affiliate Marketing

Another way is through affiliate marketing – also not paid search.

Display Networks through Paid Search Providers

Yet another way – and one we actually offer as a service – is buying remnant space through services such as the Google AdWords Display Network.  Google called this their content network until very recently so you may hear both terms bandied about.  With the Display Network you have the option of paying on a per click basis.

For this type of banner advertising, it would be correct to classify it as “pay per click.”  And it is offered through a paid search provider.  However, since the ad displays in most instances on non-search result pages*, I wouldn’t call it paid search.  If you’re using contextual advertising – where you’re trying to match up your ad to pages with similar content based on keywords you can put in the ad group – it would have a relationship to keywords, but still not really paid search.

* Your ad could appear on the results page of a site search or an arbitrage site purporting to show users relevant information, but these don’t really count.

If you’re new to internet marketing and find information like this post helpful, you may also want to check out our Internet Marketing Terms Glossary – all plain spoken English with definitions of over 100 terms.  Happy advertising!

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