Based on your request, it would be desirable to review the placement of your Performance Max ads, especially when you are not satisfied with the results in your advertising account, correct? And you want to slightly adjust the traffic options, or you have encountered a situation due to Google’s fault, for example, as in the previous video, I may leave a hint somewhere.
While requesting compensation from Google for its mistake, you can also check the placement of your Performance Max ads and simply apply a list of negative keywords.
Manual verification of location
You can check these locations for a very long time, in a very primitive way, taking each location in turn.
How many calls and sales will I get by ordering contextual advertising from you?
I am referring more to websites like these. You can manually visit them, open a new tab, see what kind of place it is, and decide whether it suits you or not.
But sometimes there are placements that can drain your entire budget, as in this campaign — one of the placements is right here. And it doesn’t look too bad, does it? Even if I disable the ad blocker and reload the page, it doesn’t look like a smart placement here.
No, these may be scam sites, you don’t need them, they need to be removed. Or, for example, like this one, 5088.online. Each of these sites, you see, doesn’t even mention games here.
It seems like it’s possible to go through them all, right? But when there are 47,000 or 50,000 of these locations, it looks pretty daunting. I’m not talking about mobile apps right now. I’ll show you what you can disable in mobile apps so that it works more or less correctly, and then you’ll have less work reviewing them. You don’t need to disable all of them, because there’s a hypothesis that you need to disable everything as much as possible and forget about it.
I am against this because there are really useful apps. For example, Viber does not drain funds, but it can generate fake orders and traffic, which can be adjusted with the budget, and it will return to the previous volumes. As for such sites, which are sometimes quite difficult to exclude because Google does not allow exceptions for categories of sites that affected performance, individual sites can be excluded. How can this be fixed?
Script options for categorizing negative words
There are many ways to fix this. For example, there is a script by Dmitry Tonkikh that you can install, which filters everything according to certain criteria. For foreign markets, I liked this script by Niels Ruj, I may be mistaken about the surname.
Why? Because it allows me to manually recheck categories and further improve them, that is, to refine the filtering functionality right away, because I don’t want to manually recheck everything, all these placements, reread them, look at them. I want the script to immediately flag everything that definitely needs to be blacklisted, what needs to be excluded, and what can still be corrected.
The only downside is that it is not quite suitable for the Ukrainian-speaking market, because, for example, it excludes domains with hyphens, and we have such hyphens, or, for example, domains with the suffix shop, online, or something like that. They can be quite relevant for us. We have many small stores that are launching such a story. Of course, it can also be just an affiliate platform through which something is sold or AdSense is turned off.
I won’t argue, it’s a little over the top. Plus, there’s no way to flexibly adjust these rules. Plus, there are quite a lot of places to post, and I have to go through them in portions, all in portions. Plus, on YouTube, for example, do I need to filter politics? For the United States, it will be relevant to get rid of Trump, who promotes himself through various videos.
But quite a lot of thinking people who might buy my product could see this political category. And that would also be good. So it’s not quite right for me. Plus, there are time restrictions on processing. Plus, I need to do something manually, maybe finish something.
Use of an updated script optimized for Ukraine
Therefore, it was decided to rewrite the script and make it a little more unique, suitable for the Ukrainian market (the script itself is available at this link). I will show you now. What do we have? We have our campaign, or you will review the entire advertising account. Take the last 7 days, of course. For me, it will be September 13-14. Why? Because during this period, this campaign had the following jumps, tests of the advertising account itself. What are we going to do? I will now add the type of placement. I don’t need mobile. I will now show you how to exclude mobile.
We can take web pages, YouTube videos, but in order to download less data, I always view them separately. I upload this to Google Sheets. Now it will ask for identification or in another format. “Download.”
“Open the sheet.” Here we have it.
Configuring and running the script
Next, what do we need? We need to connect our script, which will filter everything. I remove these two lines so that the script does not take them into account for filtering.
Go to Extensions and open Apps Script. I will provide the script file separately. What do we do? We insert it.
The only thing you need to do is change the file ID.
How do you change it? We have a location where we want to make changes. Just make sure that the file opened under the same email address where you will be working on this script, OK. If not, then be sure to open it in the editor so that you don’t encounter any problems with confirming access rights.
We did it. Copy this identifier, which comes after /d/, here it is, and before /edit.
Let’s go here and change it. Changed.
After that, save it.
Let’s try to launch it. The system will now ask us to authenticate or it will not ask. If it asks, just go through the process.
See how to view permissions (rights) for editing. I select the same email, select “All.” Continue. And now let’s see. ADW Placement Editor. Check the correct ID again. Copy. Share everything. We have all the editors. Change again. Run. Everything was correct. The script went to process.
The main thing is that there are no errors. After that, the script already gave me a message.
It needs to be updated here. You can update this file.
I removed the titles. They don’t really fit here. Those who are interested can add more titles themselves. I didn’t add them because they slow down the script. I have a lot of space here.
Please note that in this script, you can configure BATCH_SIZE, which is the number of lines it can process. It is better to set a smaller value at first to make sure that everything is processed, and then you can set a larger value.
How many calls and sales will I get by ordering contextual advertising from you?
How does this thing work? Because, as you can see, it hasn’t processed all the lines yet. After you reload the page, this block appears. I click “Run (batch)” and it will run another batch of 4,000 and more.
Here, I have 479, correct? Almost done, all 4,000 are done. Look, 4,000 locations. This menu has various functions. I will add it to the instructions. To start processing again, you need to click “Reset progress” and it will start processing them from the beginning.
Processing the file with results
What can we see here? Based on the criteria I have devised, there are statuses, which are divided into EXCLUDE, which can be excluded immediately, KEEP, which can be kept, and REVIEW, which can be reviewed additionally.
If we take only EXCLUDE now, we will see locations, sometimes it is not clear at all what it is, a game or something like that, which can be excluded. Here are Games. Here you see, for example, Agromania – Android. Agro- and Games Mania.
This can be corrected. You can turn it off or change it if something goes wrong.
It’s convenient to view them here: aktualno, allrecipes, apelsinka online. You see, agromania has flown in here. It can be removed from this list of exceptions.
For example, some kind of junk resource for all kinds of nonsense. MFA-suspicious is a categorization. There are audiobooks, there is gaming, you see, berryplaytime.com, there is gambling – betsapi.com. Based on the criteria of betsapi.com, I don’t even know what it is, but based on the criteria, the system determined that it is gambling.
Let’s move on. Chudesa.site. There are Russian websites here, see? Cookeranna.ru. See Recipes? You already have a category. What can you take from here? For example, gaming, suspicious, recipes — you already have a ready-made list. Once. Well, you choose what you want to exclude and what not. It’s very convenient. You look through it once or twice and that’s it.
You can even view them right away on the review pages. They’re all here from A to Z. And you can add something else here.
Other, for example, check out 06239.com.ua. What is it? It recommends its review. Suitable for you or not.
And you can change these statuses here if you really want to bother. But it makes sense to bother with those that are super according to the indicators. See, like me, here gospodynka.com.ua, taboolanews.com – News/Media, they can be removed. Here EXCLUDE novyny.live MFA-suspicious has determined.
And it went and went. And this ivansolar2010.com, you see, it says REWIEV, but I think it’s also a question of where it’s located. You see, some kind of solar 2010, but the site was created recently. So it’s also a question of where it’s located. You can review it and make additional adjustments. That’s the advantage of this thing.
I have this EXCLUDE list. I’m copying it.
I go to my advertising account and come back. I go to “Campaigns” so that all my campaigns are here. I go to “Content.” There is an exception here — “Change exception” — “Account.”
That’s a must. I click “Add.” I enter this list.
Add 411 places. “Save.” That’s it. I definitely won’t be staying at these places.
How often should you review it? You can do it once a month if you have a small number of these views. If you have a significant skew, you can review it weekly or every two weeks.
How to exclude mobile placements?
How to disable mobile locations? Go to the “Applications” category and scroll through it.
Look, these are all categories of applications.
You can exclude them all, but what’s the point? You can only exclude some of them. For example, “books.” Are they necessary or not? You need to think about advertising in books. “Business” and “catalogues” are okay, “education” can be excluded, “entertainment” can definitely be excluded, as well as “finance” and “food.”
Hey, guys, watch closely. It’s been removed. Now I’ll show you that you need to uncheck all the boxes. It’s better to go through it and check them off. See, Google hides it. See, it hid it once. Here’s proof that you can freely write to Google and ask them to compensate you.
“Health” and “fitness” are up to you, especially if you have related products, it makes sense to launch there. “Lifestyle” can be left or removed. You can then look at the categories of apps that will appear. “Newspapers,” “art and photography,” “brides” — not necessary. “Investing,” “shops,” “children’s.” Cooking is okay, crafts too. Entertainment, fashion & style, history, magazines & journals, men’s interests are interesting. Music, politics, outdoors. Parenting can be removed.
“Animals” — view at your own discretion. If you have products for animals, you don’t need to remove them, because these people are very easily persuaded to buy things for their pets. What’s here? “Science,” “sport,” and “teens” can obviously be removed. “Medical” can be removed, and “music” is up to you. I would leave “Navigation” because local ones work. I would leave “Navigation.” I would remove “Photos and videos.” “Productivity” — people here are obsessed with being super productive, and we’re here with our own advertising. I would remove “Reference.” I would leave “Shopping.” I would leave “Social networking.” “Sports” — at your discretion.
“Stickers” are straightforward. Sometimes it makes sense to simply review certain placements and exclude those that are clearly not suitable. “Utilize” — use your discretion. You can leave it or remove it. I often leave “Weather,” but some people prefer to remove it. “Travel” — if you have travel products, don’t remove it. That’s how it works. “Games” — look, they’re hidden.
You go through all these blocks and checkboxes. It actually seems to take forever. No, you only have to do it once. I don’t need “Tools” or “Food and Drink.” “Libraries” — I’ll have to think about it. “Parenting” — goodbye, I don’t need that. I don’t need “Dating,” it doesn’t suit me. This suits me. “Books” can be removed. “Comics,” “Beauty” — I can leave these, they suit me. “Art,” “Design,” “Music,” “Education,” “Personalization” — I can try these. “Weather” and “travel” are suitable. “Events,” “productivity,” “entertainment,” “social,” “sports,” “communication,” and “lifestyle.” Here, “games” is all, “education” can be removed, and “photography” can be left. They suit me. As you can see, I don’t exclude everything.
What is the best way to restart the script?
In fact, if I didn’t say anything, it would take 5-6 minutes to download and generate the report. Run this script, which will be saved there — you can just take it here and delete everything. Next time, you just delete everything. Delete it, add new locations here. Click “Reset progress,” “Run (batch).” That’s it. It will do it for you.
In this regard, it is more convenient for me to review all these items, so I can decide whether I need something or not. For example, take a look at 5088.online. We looked at it last time; it is a gaming site. It must be excluded additionally.
Conclusions
If you sit down and develop rules for these things, you can maintain a format that is quite sensible and decent in terms of placement, which you can then count on not repeating. It makes sense to review these placements once a month.
When you have smooth, good analytics in your account and you don’t have any major disruptions from super-minusing these platforms, ROAS won’t grow, to be honest. So remember that you have one of the main placements that can eat up almost your entire budget, and you won’t turn it off for anything in the world. It’s called “Google-managed properties.”
It is often quite aggressive and active, so it can eat up most of your money, and you won’t be able to turn it off.
