Create display network exclusion lists with this (free) tool

Tired of manually weeding through placement reports to exclude inappropriate websites and apps from your display campaigns? So was Dave Rigotti. He’s built a tool called ExclusionSites.com. And it’s about as straightforward as its name.

“I’ve spent 15 years managing paid media and running marketing teams,” said Rigotti, “and I am always shocked to see some of the sites and content display ads would show up alongside.” Rigotti is head of Commercial Account-Based Marketing for Adobe Experience Cloud, but created this on the side. (I first met Dave in 2013 when he and a colleague built a free UTM tagging tool for Bing Ads URLs back when we had to do that manually.)

Crowdsourcing. Out of his own frustration and need to get time back in his day, Rigotti started crowdsourcing exclusions lists from his marketing friends. “The more I talked about the idea with companies, the more I heard that many have exclusion lists of 100K websites (or more!),” he said. Those lists weren’t categorized in any way, though, and were also a hassle to manage.

How it works. First you create a free account on the site. Note, that if you say you’re with an agency, there is field that asks you to list your top five clients. This field is optional, and Rigotti explained why he included it, “It’s an optional field. Feel free to put nothing or ‘x’. However, it’s helpful for me to know what types of companies/brands are using the product so it can evolve to fit [the] needs of those companies. e.g. SMB vs ENT, B2B vs B2C, US brands for intl brands, etc.”

Then you can quickly start creating lists. The screenshot below shows the no-nonsense interface. You can select categories of crowdsourced exclusions and add your own lists manually to combine them.

Once you click the Create button (not shown here), the list will appear on your Exclusions Dashboard where you can copy the text list in a couple of formats and import it into your ad accounts.

Why we care. Managing brand safety in display campaigns can be time-consuming and/or expensive. If you or your team are currently trying to manage exclusions on your own manually, this tool could help. You’ll still want to do some due diligence after you create your lists to ensure the crowdsourced lists are the right fit for your brand.

Feb. 27: Updated to include information about the client field.