This post was originally published on June 13, 2019 as a stand-alone post. However because of the way it fit into our series on Smart Shopping Campaigns, we decided to re-release it as the 4th installment in the series.

You can read the previous 3 posts here: What Is Smart Shopping? – Part 1: The ZATO Guide to Google Smart Shopping Campaigns

‍Establish Your Strategy – Part 2: The ZATO Guide to Google Smart Shopping Campaigns

‍Should You Switch From Standard Shopping Ads to Google Smart Shopping? – Part 3: The ZATO Guide to Google Smart Shopping Campaigns‍

Just yesterday, we at ZATO discovered and shared that you could see placements in your Smart Shopping campaigns through the API. I lamented in that post (here: How to See Placements in Google Smart Shopping Campaigns ) that we couldn't add them as exclusions. Well thanks to a line of questioning on Twitter (Thanks Emma, Dan, Andrea, and Liam!) and then our own experimentation, we have learned that you can actually add these in as Account Level Placement Exclusions! To SMART SHOPPING campaigns! Google's Black Box obtains a small chink of in its armor of manual optimization (*gasp*).

Here is how you exclude placements in Google Smart Shopping campaigns:

(1) Navigate to (or create) a Smart Shopping Campaign of your choosing.

(2) Discover which placements or mobile apps you need to exclude from your Google Smart Shopping campaigns.

Use this helpful walk-through we created for seeing this data: How to See Placements in Google Smart Shopping Campaigns.Video re-shared for your convenience, transcript and screenshots in link above.

(3) Select the Placements tab.

(4) Select the Edit Icon and change the Dropdown from "Campaign" to "ACCOUNT".

This is very important, because you cannot add placement exclusions to Smart Shopping campaigns at a Campaign level! Why not, you ask? Who knows.

(5) Select all the Youtube Channels, Videos, and Website Placements that you want to exclude and get going!

Don't forget two of our favorite exclusion lists to add to every account:

• Seer Interactive's Top Display Placements to Exclude
• Joe Martinez' Kid Videos to Exclude on Clix Marketing

Thanks to those who got us digging in to uncover this! I'm PPCKirk, and I'd love to connect with you on: Twitter & LinkedIn.

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