(NOT READY) How-To: URL Placement Negation (self-onboarding)

We are working on the tech side of things, and we will announce to wider SEM team once this is ready to set up

Overview

Setup time approximation: 15 mins

To set up the URL Placement Negation Tool, follow these steps:

1. Create a Google Sheet that Store the Shared Sets Details:

First, you will need to make a copy of this Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJvPelEqGwg_UErYRnDABcPfhDeZ66v-BhV8ELI9M88/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Enter the login_customer_id and customer_id where you want the shared set to be created. Provide the desired name for the shared set, and keep NEGATIVE_PLACEMENTS in the type column for URL Placement Negation. Each row corresponds to a new shared set.

Example for Ralph Lauren:
I want to create a shared set for the Ralph account: Ralph Lauren PLA (947-853-2218)

The customer ID is the account id, so in this case, it will be 947-853-2218. And the Login-customer-id will be the Manager account id so in this case, it will be 782-628-8216.

I’ll name this shared set: Alli_Action_PLA_Placement_Exclusion_lists

Next, I’ll enter all this information into the Google Sheet as shown below::

Copy the URL for your Google Sheet, you will need it in a bit.

2. Create an Alli Action that creates the Shared Sets:

Head to the Alli Action Site and click the blue button: Create Action

Search: Create Shared Set and click Select

Give your action a name, and select an authenticated account that has access to the Google Ads that you are trying to create the Shared Set. Click Next

Select Google Sheets as your data origin, and paste the Google Sheet URL into the URL section. And click Save

It will bring you to this page and hit Publish

Click Run Now The action will run and create the shared set in the Google Ads platform.

Now that your shared set is set up, you can move on to the next step: creating an Alli datasource to pull the placement URLs daily and upload the filtered URLs to Google Ads each day.

3. Set up Alli Datasource to pull Shared Set ID

First, you need a datasource that pulls the shared set ID on the shared set that you want to update.

Head to the Alli Data site, click Add New Dataaource

Screenshot 2024-08-14 at 3.45.11 PM 1.png

Search Google Adsand click on it

Give your datasource a meaningful name:

Choose an account for authorization. The best is to use the reporting account. Click Next

Select the customer that your shared set is in, so in my example, I will pick the Ralph Lauren PLA (9478532218) account . You can select multiple options if you have shared sets in different accounts. For report type, select: Shared Set

In the Define your data section, select the following fields:

Finally, select a date range, if your shared set was created today, put today’s date in the date range and hit Load Data

It will take maybe a couple minutes to load:

You will get this message once it’s done:

You will now head to Explorer, and create a New Data Report and select Edit Custom SQL :

You will query the datasrouce that you just created and filter the shared_set_name to the shared set that you are trying to update, and you will copy the id in the shared_set_resource_name:
So in my example: customers/9478532218/sharedSets/9946398308 is the shared_set id that I will need.

4. Set up Alli Datasource to pull Placement URLs

now you create a datasource that pulls all the placement URLs that you are trying to add to the shared_set.

Head to the Alli Data site, click Add New Dataaource

Search Google Adsagain:

Give your datasource a meaningful name like pla_negation_urls:

Choose an account for authorization. The best is to use the reporting account. Click Next

Select the customer that your placement URLs are in, so in my example, I will pick the Ralph Lauren PLA (9478532218) account. You can select multiple options if you have shared sets in different accounts. For report type, select: Group Placement View

In the Define your data section, select the following fields and click Save:

Select a date range and hit Load Data

Once the datasource has loaded, you will head to the Explorer page and create a new report in custom SQL. This new report will be the source of truth of placement URLs that you want to add to the shared_set.

In Ralph’s example, they want to add all the placement URLs that are “WEBSITE” and exclude everything that is coming from “Google”, “Gmail”, “Yahoo”, and “Youtube”.
In your SQL query, you will also need to set the login_customer_id, cutomer_id, and the shared_set_id that you got in the previous step:
Make sure your reports have these 4 columns: placement_url, shared_set, customer_id, login_customer_id

CODE

select distinct * from 
  (SELECT group_placement_view_placement AS placement_url,
          group_placement_view_placement_type AS placement_type,
          'customers/9478532218/sharedSets/9946398308' AS shared_set,
          '9478532218' AS customer_id,
          '7866298216' AS login_customer_id
   FROM
     (SELECT DISTINCT group_placement_view_placement,
                      group_placement_view_placement_taype
      FROM {CLIENT_NAME}.pla_negation_urls
      WHERE group_placement_view_placement_type = 'WEBSITE'
        AND group_placement_view_placement NOT ILIKE '%google%'
        AND group_placement_view_placement NOT ILIKE '%gmail%'
        AND group_placement_view_placement NOT ILIKE '%yahoo%'
        AND group_placement_view_placement NOT ILIKE '%youtube%'))

Give this report a name, save the report, and publish it. Have the report name ready, you will need this in our final step.

Now to the final step:

5. Set up Alli Action to send Placement URLs to the Shared Set

Head to the Alli Action Site and click the blue button: Create Action

Search: Add Negative URL to Shared Set and click Select

Give your action a name, and select an authenticated account that has access to the Google Ads account that you are trying to update the Shared Set. Click Next

In the SET DATASOURCE section, select Alli Data and the name of the report will be the report that you created in the previous step with the client name in front:
In my example, it will be ralph_lauren.pla_placement_exclusion_url_alli_action

Hit Run Now, if you want the action to run immediately or you can also set up a schedule for it to run Weekly or Daily. You can set this schedule up in the REVIEW ACTION section

Now your URL Placement Negation is set up.