Automatic Placement Exclusion

Using the vast amount of data available from on-site, in-ad and Google Ads, fraud0 can help you automatically exclude placements in your Google Ads accounts. This page gives you an overview about what is necessary to set up this feature, how it works from a technical point of view, what logic it follows, and how you can customize it.

How To Set Up Automatic Placement Exclusion

Connect your Google Ads account

Connecting your Google Ads account is a prerequisite for fraud0 to automatically exclude placements. To find out how to do this, please read the Automatic IP Blocking article and follow the directions.
Review Placements to Exclude (optional)

Navigate to the Management > Placement Exclusions page. There, you will find a table of recommended placement exclusions, including the placement domain, evidence why it is considered to be excluded and the data source(s) used to determine the evidence. The table gives you an opportunity to review the list of placements to exclude before actually enabling the feature, including a search function to search for specific placement domains. You can also download the complete list as a CSV file using the Download List button.
If you find individual placements during your review that you do not want to have excluded despite the evidence, you can add them to your own Placements Not To Exclude list. Just add any placements you never want to have excluded to this list on the Placements Not To Exclude tab on the top of the Management > Placement Exclusions page. On that tab, you can also view other placements that fraud0 will not exclude. We make sure to never exclude placements of premium publishers.
Enable Placement Exclusion

On the Management > Placement Exclusions page, switch the toggle on the top right from *Off to On. The placements in the list will automatically get excluded on your connected Google Ads account(s) on an account level. These placements are now automatically excluded for all your Google Ads campaigns.
Let fraud0 automatically exclude newly detected placements

fraud0 will automatically update the list of placement exclusions for you based on a few rules (see below) using the latest intelligence available. Every update is automatically synchronised with Google Ads. This update happens once per day to ensure that your Google Ads accounts are protected from the latest bad placements that were only detected recently. For the rules that are used to determine which placements shall be excluded, see the description below.

Automatic Placement Exclusion Rules

The recommended placement exclusion list is compiled on a daily basis using a number of rules using the latest intelligence available to fraud0. This section briefly explains the logic of the rule, the data source it uses, and the rationale behind it.

Manually curated exclusion list

fraud0 manages a manually curated exclusion list. Placements on this list are always excluded, unless they appear on your Placements Not To Exclude list. We try to keep this list minimal, as ideally all bad placements should be detected through the logic of the other rules.

Google Ads placements with improbably high click-through rates (CTR)

Using Google Ads statistics, we can determine placements with unusually high CTRs. For this, we aggregate the statistics of all customers that connected their Google Ads accounts. While individual customers often cannot get reliable information about CTRs, we use our comprehensive view across the data of all customers to get a good sample and to determine those placements that show an improbably high CTR.

In this rule, all placements with a CTR of 20% or higher and at least 20 impressions in the last 365 days are excluded.

Very high CTRs are a strong indicator for possible publisher click fraud. Fraudulent publishers will set up their websites to show ads through Google Ads, and will then create a large amount of ad impressions and clicks through artificial means, either through bots or through fraudulent human clicks. Average consumer behaviour including ad clicks are generally known, so unusually high click rates are a strong sign of click fraud. For Display campaigns, industry estimates of legitimate CTRs range around 0.5% to 1%.

In-ad placements with very high bot rates

This rule employs in-ad data across our customers to determine placements with a very high bot rate. High bot rates in ad impressions are an indicator that you will not get an organic human audience on a particular placement, and rather show your ad to bots.

This rule excludes all placements found in in-ad data with a bot rate of 70% or higher and at least 20 ad impressions in the last 365 days.

On-site referrer domains with very high bot rates

Similar to the previous rule, this rule look at on-site referrer data instead. Referrers with a high bot rate are another strong indicator for click fraud in which fraudulent bots will click on ads in order to get to the landing page. Placements like these will not be benificial to reaching the human audience you would want to reach, and therefore get excluded.

The threshold for this rule is a bot rate of 70% or higher, and at least 20 sessions with that referrer domain in the last 365 days.

Newly created domains

This rule is a reaction to a recent trend our bot researchers observed: fraudulent publishers will register new domains, generate content using generative AI, and embed Google Ads using an existing, previously approved seller ID. This is seemingly a fully automated process in which fraudulent websites can be launched on a large scale. An effective way to protect against this is to exclude any placements of newly created domain.

This rule excludes all domains that were registered within the last 30 days to counter this phenomenon.

Placements with low-quality generic TLDs

Google Ads is notorious for a “long tail” of ad impressions on low quality websites with only very few impressions each. These low quality impressions that often show either very low and improbably high CTRs still add up. An effective way to tackle these is to exclude any placements with low-quality generic TLDs such as .best, .lol, or .webcam. In total, fraud0 maintains a list of about 100 TLDs. Our support team can provide you the list on request.

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