Take Control of Your Google Display Placements
As You Scale Search, Display and Video Will Follow
As you expand your paid search strategy, you will inevitably begin leveraging Display and Video inventory within your Google Ads account. This may include Performance Max campaigns, Demand Gen, traditional Display banners, or Video Action campaigns.These formats can help drive incremental conversions and contain rising costs—but it’s important to recognize that by activating these campaigns, you’re extending your reach far beyond the safe confines of Search. Your ads will begin to appear across a vast and diverse network of placements.
We provide a high-level overview of these environments in our article Performance Max Placements Explained: Where Your Ads Show in 2025.
In this section, we focus specifically on the flexible brand safety and placement control settings available at the Google Ads account level.
How to Manage Placement Controls
Go to Tools > Content Suitability in your Google Ads account.Here you’ll find an extensive set of options to limit or refine your placement inventory.
Before configuring, define your priorities.
Any restriction on placements may limit Google’s ability to optimize campaigns efficiently and to access the lowest-cost traffic.
What matters most to your business today: Brand Safety or Cost Efficiency?
If brand safety is your primary concern, broader exclusion settings may be necessary. These will limit inventory but ensure your ads appear only in the most brand-appropriate contexts.
If your top priority is performance at the lowest possible cost, consider restricting only high-risk placements (e.g., known fraud-prone categories), while maintaining access to political, news-related, and other sensitive content types.
Your ads might appear next to controversial stories—but only when it's necessary to reach a potentially high-value audience.
Excluded Sensitive Content
Exclude entire categories of content where your display and text-image banners may appear. This option is best suited for enhancing brand safety controls. Typically, it has minimal impact on inventory cost.
Excluded Types and Labels
Remove specific types of websites and YouTube content placements. By default, you can safely exclude “Parked Domains” — low-value sites with little to no contextual relevance, which often attract SIVT/GIVT traffic (such as bad device IDs, invalid browsers, or ultra-fast clicks).
Excluded Content Themes
Instead of excluding all news content (which represents a large portion of available inventory), consider excluding political content categories to reduce reputational risk.
Excluded Placements
Review your PMAX placement reports to identify specific websites that appear unsafe but contribute a significant share of impressions. Add these domains to your account-level exclusion list (Black List) to prevent future delivery.