Google launches new Adwords tool - Site Category Exclusion

Category: Adwords, Click fraud, Google, PPC, SEM

The latest Google launch (an boy have they been busy lately!!) is the “Category Exclusion tool” for Google Adwords advertisers. Basically, what this tool allows you to do is block your ads from appearing on poor quality sites that are not converting for you.

It is a great move from Google to fight against the ever increase click fraud that is rampaging their contextual network and increasing at an alarming rate. (now I remeber I wanted to make a post on this which I will do soon). Click fraud in the Google contextual network was reported to have increase to 28.5% in the 4th quarter of 2007 from around 18-19% in the first quarter of 2007 if I remember correctly.

I know for a fact that many Google Ad campaigns now only display on the Google search pages as these ads convert at a much higher rate. This tool will allow advertisers to delve back into the Google contextual network and experiment on websites and block out the sites which are converting poorly. This means of course more ad spending for Google! :)

I will not go into all the details of the tool as it has been explained already very elaborately here.

Edit:

There is a rumor going around that Google will soon limit the site exclusion limit to 5,000 websites. If you currently excluding over 5,000 sites within the Google content network, you are safe and Google won’t drop them from your list. So before this rule goes in, it maybe worth excluding as many sites as possible which are not performing well for you.