How do you exclude irrelevant websites and apps?

You export a placement report and scroll past names you never heard of. Game apps with three-letter titles. Coupon sites that list expired deals. Content farms that rewrite the same headline six ways. Each one charged you before you knew it existed.

Excluding irrelevant websites and apps is one of the most practical brand safety skills you can build. It is less about theory and more about a repeatable habit: find the source, confirm it adds no value, block it, check again next month. Here is a clear process you can run on any display or app-enabled campaign.

How do you exclude irrelevant websites and apps?

Start with data from placement or site reports in your ad account. Sort by spend or impressions and look for sources with high volume and weak on-site behavior. Irrelevant does not always mean offensive. A harmless cooking blog is still irrelevant if you sell commercial insurance.

Confirm irrelevance with at least two signals: zero or near-zero conversions, very short visit duration, and content that clearly mismatches your offer. One odd click is not enough to exclude. Patterns over one or two weeks justify action.

1. Build a master exclusion list

Keep one spreadsheet or shared document of excluded domains, app IDs, and channel names. When any campaign finds a bad source, add it for the whole account. Duplicate exclusions across campaigns waste time and leave gaps.

2. Exclude at the highest level available

Account-level placement exclusions protect every current and future campaign. Use campaign-level exclusions only when a source is irrelevant to one offer but fine for another. Higher-level blocks reduce maintenance.

3. Separate mobile apps from websites

App placements appear under app names, not URLs. Mobile games and utility apps often dominate spend without producing leads. Exclude app categories that repeat the same empty click pattern if individual titles are too numerous to manage one by one.

4. Re-check after major setting changes

New audiences, new creative, or loosened targeting can unlock fresh inventory. Run a placement audit two weeks after any major change. Old blocklists do not cover new delivery paths.

When exclusion is not the right move

Do not exclude a high-spend placement that converts just because the site looks cheap. Ugly pages sometimes produce buyers. Exclude on evidence, not aesthetics. Likewise, avoid blocking broad categories that include sites your customers actually use unless data supports it.

For display network filters, read display network placement control. For low quality networks that supply many bad placements at once, see avoiding low quality publisher networks. Reputation-focused exclusion habits are covered in the chapter on protecting brand reputation through exclusions.

Frequently asked questions