How often should placement performance be reviewed?

Monthly is common for active Display and Video campaigns, more frequently for higher-spend accounts, since automatic placement targeting can accumulate wasted spend on poor placements fairly quickly if left unchecked.

Do automatic placements always perform worse than managed ones?

Not necessarily, automatic placements can find strong-performing inventory a person wouldn't have manually selected, the point of reviewing the performance report is to identify and exclude specifically the placements that aren't working, not to abandon automatic targeting entirely.

What's a placement exclusion list?

A reusable set of sites, apps, or categories excluded across multiple campaigns at once, similar in concept to a negative keyword list, saving the need to exclude the same poor placements repeatedly for every new campaign.

Does placement matter for Search campaigns?

Less directly, Search ads appear on search results pages themselves rather than across a broad network, so placement review is far more relevant to Display, Video, and social advertising than to Search.

Can placement affect brand safety?

Yes, this is one of the main reasons advertisers use managed placements or exclusions, to prevent ads from appearing alongside content that could be inappropriate, controversial, or otherwise inconsistent with the brand.

What Is Ad Placement?

Ad placement is the specific location where an ad actually appears, a particular website, app, video, search results page, or position on a page. It's distinct from targeting: targeting decides who sees an ad, placement decides where, physically, that ad shows up.

How Ad Placement Works

Placements vary by ad type and channel. Search placements show ads directly on search engine results pages, above or alongside organic results. Display network placements show ads on third-party websites and apps that are part of an ad network. In-feed placements show ads within a social media feed, styled to resemble the surrounding organic content. In-stream placements show video ads before, during, or after video content.

Advertisers generally choose between two placement approaches. Automatic placements let the platform's algorithm choose where to show display or video ads, based on where it predicts the target audience is most likely to engage, reaching more scale with less manual setup, and it's the default behaviour inside most automated ad campaigns. Managed placements let an advertiser manually select specific sites, apps, or videos to run on, or specifically exclude, trading some scale for more control over brand safety and where budget is actually spent.

Use Cases of Ad Placement

A brand running Display ads on automatic placement notices spend concentrating on a handful of low-quality content-farm sites, and switches part of the budget to managed placements on a curated list of relevant, reputable publishers.
A financial services company excludes news and current-events sites from its Display placements as a brand-safety precaution, preferring not to appear alongside unpredictable, sensitive editorial content.
A gaming app uses managed placements to run specifically inside a small set of gaming-related apps known to convert well, rather than relying on the broader automatic network.
An advertiser compares cost per acquisition on automatic placements against a curated managed-placement list built from its own best-performing sites, and finds the managed list delivers a lower CPA despite reaching a smaller total audience.

Placement is closely tied to placement exclusions, the practice of removing specific low-quality or irrelevant sites, apps, or content categories after reviewing a placement performance report. This is one of the most common and effective account hygiene tasks in display and video campaigns, working much like negative keywords do on search, since automatic placement targeting will otherwise keep spending on any technically eligible site, including ones generating clicks but no real conversions.

Why Ad Placement Matters

Two ads with identical targeting and creative can perform very differently depending on where they're actually shown. Reviewing and refining placements is one of the more overlooked levers for improving campaign efficiency, particularly on the display and video networks, where automatic placement can otherwise quietly waste spend on low-quality inventory, including inventory with poor ad viewability.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should placement performance be reviewed?: Monthly is common for active Display and Video campaigns, more frequently for higher-spend accounts, since automatic placement targeting can accumulate wasted spend on poor placements fairly quickly if left unchecked.
Do automatic placements always perform worse than managed ones?: Not necessarily, automatic placements can find strong-performing inventory a person wouldn't have manually selected, the point of reviewing the performance report is to identify and exclude specifically the placements that aren't working, not to abandon automatic targeting entirely.
What's a placement exclusion list?: A reusable set of sites, apps, or categories excluded across multiple campaigns at once, similar in concept to a negative keyword list, saving the need to exclude the same poor placements repeatedly for every new campaign.
Does placement matter for Search campaigns?: Less directly, Search ads appear on search results pages themselves rather than across a broad network, so placement review is far more relevant to Display, Video, and social advertising than to Search.
Can placement affect brand safety?: Yes, this is one of the main reasons advertisers use managed placements or exclusions, to prevent ads from appearing alongside content that could be inappropriate, controversial, or otherwise inconsistent with the brand.

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