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Exclusion Targeting

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Refine where your ads show

Essential to all kinds of display activity is excluding targeting. This enables you to exclude where your ads show. You can exclude specific demographics, audiences, keywords, placements, topics, and you can exclude the marketing list like people who have recently bought, and you can also exclude wider category lists as well.

You can exclude certain targets from your company based on different criteria.

Changes in your KPIs

If something changes in your KPIs you might want to just jump in and exclude a certain audience. From what you’re seeing in the analytics, new research might have emerged or you’re noticing trends in the observation reports. These are reasons to exclude audiences to refine. Consider it like adding negative keywords to your search campaign. You’re now adding negative audiences or negative placements, and so on. to your display campaign to remove the things that are less effective and focus solely on the things that are effective.

By mobile apps

Moreover, you can exclude devices so you can exclude mobile apps, or mobile app traffic. So there is a placement that you can add as a negative placement called adsenseformobileapps.com. If you add adsenseformobileapps.com you will exclude all mobile apps from your GDN display campaign. It’s useful if you aren’t associated with apps, or indeed you don’t want to be associated with gaming apps. For example, if you’re targeting a certain audience, you might want to exclude people using certain mobile apps. If they’re on Angry Birds or if they’re on another gaming app, they may not be in the correct mindset or frame of mind to engage with your product, despite them being in the audience. So you might want to remove that from the mix.

By content labels

A deeper dive, a very important dive into the type of exclusions, you can look at are content and site category exclusions. So, these are predefined category groups to try and protect your brand from being associated with unwanted content or violent content. There’s a list of unwanted content and category exclusions for all display campaigns, and we should add them, they’re in the setting section.

By sensitive content

You don’t want to be associated with sensitive content, tragedy, profanity, anything that’s overly suggestive or indeed sensationally shocking content. If you want to protect your brand and ensure that we don’t veer and associate our brand with this type of content, site category exclusions are essential to doing this.

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Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a well-known digital marketing director, commercial analyst, and ecommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.

Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specialises in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimisition.  Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.

Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.

Over his career, Cathal has worked client-Side, in digital marketing agencies and media owners with brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.

He can be reached on LinkedIn here.

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Display Advertising
Cathal Melinn
Skills Expert

This module introduces the key concepts involved in display advertising. It covers the advantages of different types of display platforms and demonstrates how to set up a display advertising campaign. It also explores the key considerations for targeting and bidding in a display advertising campaign, and how to report on and optimize campaign performance.