Digital content labels in Display & Video 360

In Display & Video 360, domains and apps are classified into different digital content labels according to the brand safeness of the content. You can target or exclude inventory that meets or exceeds your brand safety requirements by using brand safety targeting. 

How content is classified into digital content labels

Content is analyzed by Google classification technology and placed in one of four brand safety levels. This classification process looks at hundreds of aspects of a site in its construction, content, quality, and user experience. Our brand safety classification is updated monthly to reflect any changes and updates to a site.

Descriptions of the digital content labels

• DL-G: Content suitable for general audiences (can also select “Content suitable for families,” which includes Made for Kids videos on YouTube).
• DL-Y: Content suitable for families.
• DL-PG: Content suitable for most audiences with parental guidance.
• DL-T: Content suitable for teen and older audiences.
• DL-MA: Content suitable only for mature audiences.
• Not yet labeled: Content that has not been labeled.

How do digital content labels compare to brand safety tiers?

Display & Video 360's former mechanism for classifying inventory was known as "brand safety tiers." The following table explains how brand safety tiers map to digital content labels.

Campaigns targeting tier:	Should target digital content label:
1	G
2	G, PG, T
3	G, PG, T
None	G, PG, T, MA, Not yet rated

About content that's not yet labeled

Content may not receive a digital content label for the following reasons:

• A site is relatively new: Sometimes when a site is new, we don't have enough data on the site to classify it. In these cases, the site will normally receive a digital content label one month later.

• A site's URL is "masked": Sometimes publishers don't make the URL of their impressions transparent, and in these cases we cannot label these publishers' URLs.

• Semi-transparent inventory: "Semi-transparent" inventory may receive any digital content label if the publisher selling the inventory has shared all of the URLs behind the bid request URL with Display & Video 360. In these situations, the publisher's inventory will be labeled according to the inventory's minimum brand safeness.

  For example, if the semi-transparent site semi-transparent-site-123.com has inventory from the following URLs,

  • abc.com (DL-G)
  • cbs.com (DL-G)
  • anothersite.com (DL-T)

  Then, semi-transparent-site-123.com will be labeled as being DL-T, since its inventory has a minimum brand safeness of "DL-T".

• A site is in a language not supported by digital content labels.

A URL is categorized by only one digital content label at a time. However, a site may have different URLs with different labels.