Why is keyword targeting for Google Display Network not working?

User Digital-marketing28 started a Reddit post questioning recent performance of their GDN campaigns:

I've been working in the online marketing industry for 20 years. This is getting crazy...Google Display network fake sites and fraud are out of control. Keyword targeting should be showing up on webpages that have our specific keywords on them. Apparently Google doesn't care.

They then go on to ask:

Has anyone been able to block sites by domain extension? (ie., .xyz)

These are some of the sites that Google thinks are real:

https://deepinside.cloud
https://globalknow.site/
https://developidea.space/
https://zaviewsport.xyz/

At the time of writing this post has 31 upvotes and 30 replies. We'll have a look at how the Reddit community responded to this and what advice they had for the original poster.

Fix it by ditching it

User samuraidr advises just to stop using GDN altogether "under any circumstances". They're not the only ones thinking that as their comment had 37 upvotes and was the top reply.

It's a fair point, as the amount of bad traffic that Google Display Network users need to deal with can feel overwhelming. Getting GDN to a point where it's a viable channel can take significant effort, and so this suggestion isn't actually so extreme. Especially where keyword targeting seems so much more hit and miss than it used to be.

On the flip side, if advertisers can get GDN working, it can be a very scalable and high-volume channel due to its size. Let's take a look at some of the more optimistic replies next!

Are you sure about the targeting?

User YRVDynamics questions whether the OPs audience targeting is correctly set up, saying "Sounds like your audience targeting and the algo is spending your money all over."

But the original poster disagrees, saying that they'd been using keyword targeting for the past 15 years. But recently they say that their keywords aren't even mentioned on the pages that ads are being shown on.

It's likely that Google is now taking the targeting keywords, converting the keywords themselves into a broad topic, and then matching ads to pages that they consider to be related to the same topic. The days of straight and simple real keyword targeting are gone.

Whilst this is helpful to Google, and may be helpful to certain advertisers who sell products with wide appeal, it's unlikely to be useful to advertisers who sell niche products or rely on finer targeting, such as the OP here.

How about blocking the dodgy domains?

User tiagoscharfy replied to say that they're seeing similar issues. In their case, they created a simple script that excludes any GDN properties not on .com, .net, or .org top-level domains.

The same script also excludes sites based on a filter list of disallowed words, and blocks gaming sites which they report getting a lot of spam from.

The user goes on to say:

There’s this guy that owns something like gamesite . Xyz, and there’s gamesite1 gamesite2 and so on till gamesite100, different domains, exact same copy. Not sure how Google allows this trash. And of course the traffic is junk. GDN converts well for me, when you exclude the bad sites, which are tons of

The OP asks for a copy of the script, but the user says they don't have a public version of it available to share. Helpfully they promise to make one. They go on to explain more about the script. It runs every hour, but they're working on a mechanism to block sites faster, as in their words "some sneaky trash sites can pop rlly fast within that hour time span and waste lots of budget".

We think this is a worthwhile approach. Our product, Hitprobe, can block poor quality referrer domains within just a second or two or receiving a click. If you like this approach but don't want to have to setup Google Ads scripts, take a look. There are many other useful features that can do even more to protect your Google Ads spend.

Other good ideas

Another Reddit user, TTFV, also replied with some good ideas.

They suggested that if the OP is really "getting hammered" they may be being specifically targeted and that may be almost impossible to deal with. But they do go on to suggest using click fraud software, blocking countries outside of the OPs target area, and adding a honeypot field to the lead/signup form.

The user also finally suggested switching to Google's demand/led generation products such as Performance Max. Although many people question the targeting options available for Performance Max too.

We think this is all pretty good advice.

The Reddit post in full