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Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

PPC advertising opens up a whole range of possibilities for those who want to get to the heart of their target audience, match their interests and turn them into a client or customer.

When creating YouTube video ads, marketers want the perfect video with great visuals, clear audio, and unique selling points that are hard to pass up. The finished video is approved by the management, tested with focus groups, uploaded to Google Ads, and broadcast on channels where the target audience is thought to spend time. But just imagine if a huge part of these views ends up being from a child audience.

According to our experience, on average, about 20-40% of advertising traffic ends up in front of the eyes of children who watch cartoons from their parents’ accounts and don’t skip over ads. With this in mind, it’s logical to notice that for every thousand rubles in an advertising budget, about 300 rubles end up wasted.

The question then arises on how to stop displaying ads to children. Taking out these kinds of impressions helps increase conversion and properly manage the advertising budget.

Children and Advertising

At first glance, the obvious solution would be to fill in all the fields of the “Demographics” section. However, this simple solution loses its luster when you imagine how many parents let their children watch cartoons on their devices and from their accounts. It’s also possible to indicate the family status “without children” in the settings, but this will also lead to a significant decrease in targeted views.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

What’s the risk of leaving this type of traffic?

If you use the TrueView In-Stream format, which charges after a 30-second viewing, then you risk spending your budget on non-target views by children, since many kids quietly wait for the end of the commercial before watching a cartoon, and many even perceive it as part of the cartoon. For that same reason, bumpers ads that pay per 1,000 impressions can eat up your funds .

A radical method that some marketers use is to schedule showing their ads only at night. However, by doing this, we cut off a huge number of potential customers.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

Options on Google Ads that reduce child traffic

Google is constantly improving its tools to accurately reach the audience. And here’s what you can do to minimize views by children:

Adding Negative Keywords

‘Cartoons’, ‘cartoon’, and ‘Peppa pig’ are a few negative keywords worth keeping.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

It’s important to consider that only single words (rather than negative phrases) are accepted, so it’s worth it to analyze how relevant single words like “Mr” or “Max” are by themselves. To set negative keywords, you should look for the most popular cartoons and videos for children.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

Please note that negative keywords should include queries that search for videos. They’re not always in the title but are filled in by the channel owner in a separate field for keywords. So, in addition to names, words such as “children”, “developing”, “childish”, etc. can also be added to negative keywords.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

Your ad will still sometimes end up on a part of the video with the specified negative keywords. This applies to recently uploaded videos whose titles have not yet been indexed.

2. Excluding Placements

A more global solution is to add entire channels with content for children to the list of exceptions for placement.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

To do this, you need a list of links to these channels. You can find ready-made databases on the network, put one together yourself by monitoring sites with ratings for children’s channels, or make one using scripts and Google APIs.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads
Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

3. Taking out certain Topics

Here you can exclude the subcategory “cartoons” in the category “arts and entertainment”. However, you will definitely lose part of the adult audience that watches shows like South Park or Futurama.

Removing Traffic from Children on YouTube video ads

4. Analyzing results and adding other exceptions

If the campaign is broadcasted for several days, you can and even need to open the placement report, flag the channels that attract inappropriate traffic, and exclude them from the campaign.

Using one of the methods or all of them at once depends on the individual characteristics of the advertising campaign. We mostly use negative keywords and channel exclusion. But don’t forget about analytics, which objectively show whether or not we’re doing the right things.

If you do not want to deal with the intricacies of advertising accounts and setting up ads on YouTube Ads, consider delegating this work to certified professionals like the Internet marketing agency Web-Sci.

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