WebProNews

AdWords advertisers to be encouraged to exclude by category

The debut of the broader Site & Category Exclusion tool will mean capping individual site exclusions to 5,000 per campaign.

Probably not many advertisers have more than 5,000 sites tagged as ones where they do not want their AdWords advertising to appear. Those that do, or want to, will have to abide by a per-campaign cap.

Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable caught wind of the change via comments made at WebmasterWorld. For advertisers with campaigns over the cap, they won't be able to add any new sites until they get below the 5,000 limit.

Ideally, Google's launch of Site & Category Exclusion tools as a webmaster option will be sufficient to handle excluding numbers of sites. If one category contains lots of sites being regularly banned by the webmaster from displaying ads, excluding by category should make managing future ad campaigns easier.

The WebmasterWorld poster prudently asked if too many exclusions would impact a campaign's Quality Score. A little paranoid, perhaps, but Google does strange things sometimes; happily, the answer from Google on this topic was no.

Schwartz provided some step by step instructions for webmasters who want to exclude lots of sites before Google imposes the cap. Though a date has not been set for putting the cap in place, webmasters who believe they need to exclude 5,000+ sites probably should not wait to do so.