Pay Per Click Advertising Tip #12 – Site Exclusion and Domain Blocking

Posted by jameszol on Jan 15, 2008 in Pay Per Click Tip Series | 0 comments

Site exclusion and domain blocking are the “negative keywords” of the content network. You might find that the content network can be very profitable if you exclude/block certain domains from showing your ads.

A detailed description of how to find sites you want to exclude from the content network will be in our upcoming Pay Per Click Advertising tips…but for now, you can check for referrers in Analytics or run reports to find out where clicks are coming from on the content network.

Some tips to keep in mind when finding sites to exclude:

1. Exclude your own site if you run AdSense or Yahoo! Search Marketing ads on your site. Why would you want to pay for somebody to click an ad that simply points right back to your site? I know it is silly…but I have witnessed it again and again and again!

2. Make sure you measure conversions – you probably don’t want to exclude a site that is generating sales for you…just because it shows up as a high volume referrer doesn’t mean you should automatically exclude it. A good example is Ezine websites. I almost excluded a HUGE referrer for one of my clients because I noticed how much it was costing. I did a little digging and found that conversions were extremely cheap from that referrer even though I thought it looked like junk traffic after glancing at the initial stats.

3. Consistently check your referrers for sites to exclude. Your budget gets reallocated each time you exclude a site so you can, and probably will, find new sites to exclude for a while so don’t “set it and forget it”.

Google AdWords Site Exclusion

There are two ways to access the Site Exclusion tool in AdWords -

1. After logging into AdWords, simply click on Tools under your Campaign Management tab and find the Site Exclusion link…

Simply choose the campaign you want to use site exclusion for and list the sites you want to exclude! It’s that easy!

2. Click into a campaign from your Campaign Management -> Campaign Summary page and click on “add” next to excluded sites under your basic campaign details…

List the sites you want to exclude, save them and you’re ready to wait for new data!

Yahoo! Search Marketing Domain Blocking

I love Yahoo!’s domain blocking because it blocks sponsored search AND content network ads from showing on the domains you list – I like it because you have probably seen some parked domain referrers that typically end up being junk referrers.

It’s easy to block domains in Yahoo!.

After you log into Yahoo! Search Marketing, click on Administration, then click Submit Domains next to the Blocked Domains option under your Account General Information section…

Write in the domains you want to block and hit submit – it’s that easy!

adCenter

Oh yeah…adCenter is lagging a little on this feature – unless I missed an announcement since they released their content network from beta last year?

Now you can exclude and block ads from showing on specific domains – use this tool to improve your ROI on your content campaigns!