Block general categories

You can block high-level groupings of ads — such as Apparel, Finance, and Health — from appearing on your network or specified inventory.

Our system classifies ads automatically, and we don't rely solely on advertiser-provided categorization. Our technology makes its best attempt to filter ads from the possible categories; however, we don't guarantee that it will block every related ad.

Jump to:

• General category blocks apply to these transactions
• Where general category blocks don’t apply
• Get started
• Supported languages

General category blocks apply to these transactions

• The Open Auction
• Private Auctions
• First Look

If you monetize inventory using Programmatic Guaranteed/Preferred Deals, you can check for the creatives being served by the buyer under the "Creative review" tab of the line item and block as needed.

Learn more about transaction types.

Where general category blocks don’t apply

• For Private Auction deals, the blocks won’t apply if you choose to enable Override blocks during the Invite buyers step.
• The following line items aren’t impacted by these blocks: Standard, Sponsorship, Price Priority, Network, and Bulk
• Open Bidding: Our network policies don’t apply to Open Bidding partners. Ads related to the categories you block can get served on a publisher through these exchanges.

Get started

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Protections  Protections
3. Click New protection  Ad content
4. Name your protection.
5. From the "Inventory type" dropdown, select the medium on which you want to control the display of ads, such as Mobile app.
6. The default is to apply the protection to all inventory. To target specific inventory:
   • Select Only protect specified inventory, click Add targeting, select an item from the dropdown, and make your targeting selections.
   • Learn more about targeting in protections.
7. Under "Blocks," click Add next to "General categories".
8. Select the checkboxes of the general categories whose ads you want to exclude.
   • You can also expand each top-level category to select sub-categories.
   • The "Estimated 7-day revenue impact" column shows how blocking the category affects your revenue.
9. Click Update.
10. Add more protections as needed and click Save.

Once you block general categories, you can always run an experiment to unblock a category on a percent of the traffic to evaluate how much revenue is impacted.

Supported languages

When you block a general category, ads in that category will be blocked if they’re in any of the following languages.

• Chinese (Simplified)
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Turkish