Connect with audiences on safe, relevant content

Our top priority is to protect viewers, creators, and advertisers on Google and YouTube. You can tailor your suitability strategy to find the right brand-safe inventory and deliver on your campaigns’ goals. At Google, we strive to lead the industry in responsible advertising, and this guide details all the ways you can protect your brand while delivering strong performance.

1. Evolve beyond brand safety to brand suitability

• Know that inventory on YouTube is safe by design.

Why: Content that doesn’t meet our content guidelines is automatically not eligible to show ads. 

Research

YouTube advertising meets 99% effectiveness for brand safety across in-stream, live stream, Shorts, and Watch Next & Home feed content as determined by the GARM Brand Safety Floor.¹

• Determine an overarching suitability strategy for your brand.

Why: The right strategy can improve campaign performance, reach new audiences, and show ads in a way that aligns with your priorities.

• Choose only the right controls to protect your brand, and don’t overdo it.

Why: Campaigns that overuse controls can see limited reach and increased CPMs.

2. Set a top-level inventory strategy, then add exclusions as needed

• Control which content to exclude with inventory types.

Why: We built inventory modes to be the cornerstone of our brand suitability offering, with standard inventory being recommended for most brands.

Tip

We recently updated our limited inventory setting to service the needs of our most sensitive advertisers.

• Exclude content types if you don’t want to serve ads against live streams or embedded videos.

Why: While this inventory meets our 99% effectiveness for brand safety, you have the option to exclude it if it does not meet your needs.

• Use excluded themes if you want to avoid topics across videos.

Why: Based on the content and metadata of videos, one or two content exclusions make sense for many advertisers based on their preferences.

Use excluded themes in Google Ads to control where your ads appear

Research

More than 90% of Video campaigns exclude 10 or fewer topics. Video campaigns that do exclude more than 10 topics see CPMs that are over 40% higher than those that exclude 10 or fewer topics.²

• For specific videos you want to avoid, use account-level negative keywords.

Why: If there are cases where terms are specifically incongruent with your brand, you can omit them.

Example

Think of a luxury retailer not wanting to appear on a video about finding discounts.

• Deploy placement exclusions for the most specific control.

Why: By excluding specific channels or videos, you can have confidence that your ads won’t serve when you know it isn’t a match for your brand.

3. Save time by using account-level content suitability settings

• Manage suitability choices across platforms.

Why: Your performance can be more consistent and predictable. You can also have fewer controls to implement, which decreases chances for human error.

• Quantify the impact of your suitability choices.

Why: Estimating how exclusions will affect your inventory, impressions, and CPM enables you to make better, more educated decisions.

 

1. Google Internal Data, Global, 2023
2. Google Data, Global, Video Campaigns, February 2022 - February 2023

 

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