About content suitability

Note

This feature is available for Audience, Performance Max, Search, and Shopping campaigns. Premium Streaming campaigns aren't supported yet.

Safeguard your brand image by blocking your ads from appearing with specific websites, terms, and types of content. There are three content suitability controls: Website control lists, content exclusions, and excluded content terms. These are account-level settings that help you protect how your brand is presented across all campaigns and ads. Whereas website exclusion lists prevent your ads from showing on specific websites, content exclusions prevent your ads from appearing with sensitive content categories that are unsuitable for your brand. Excluded content terms block your ads from showing next to unwanted terms (i.e., page titles).

Website exclusion lists are applied at the account level in addition to any exclusions you set at the campaign or ad group levels. See How to prevent your ads from showing to certain people for more information about setting website exclusions at the campaign or ad group levels.

Content exclusions

Important

• While content suitability controls help advertisers maintain a positive online presence and mitigate risk, we cannot guarantee that all content exclusions will be blocked.
• For some advertisers, Content exclusions are called Excluded content themes in Microsoft Advertising Platform.

Content exclusions allow you to choose which sensitive content categories you want to prevent your ads from appearing alongside. See below for information on how to apply content exclusions.

We partner with Integral Ad Science (IAS) to protect your ads from serving with your selected content categories. Content exclusions provide additional safeguards alongside IAS's automatic brand protection. By default, our partnership with IAS helps prevent ads that serve in audience placements from appearing with content that's never suitable for advertising. IAS checks websites for the following content, and we automatically block your ads from serving on websites deemed to be of medium and high-risk:

• Adult
• Alcohol
• Gambling
• Hate speech
• Illegal downloads
• Illegal drugs
• Offensive language
• Violence

Note

These content categories broadly align with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) framework for unsafe content.

If you want added protection for sensitive content categories beyond those listed above, you can always update your content exclusion settings.

Note

Microsoft Advertising completes brand safety checks for Microsoft owned and operated sites in addition to IAS. We don't serve ads with any content we deem to be unsafe.

• Get started with content exclusions

  You can choose the sensitive content categories that you want to exclude your ads from serving alongside by following these instructions:

  1. From the navigation menu on the left, hover over Tools and select Content suitability.
  2. Select Content exclusions.
  3. Below Select sensitive content categories to exclude, select the checkbox next to the appropriate content categories.
  4. Select Save.

• About sensitive content categories

  These content categories are powered by IAS using their Context Control Avoidance solution:

  Category	Description
  Crime	Content relating to crime and harmful acts to individuals and society, including human rights violations. This includes educational, informative, and scientific content related to the topic.
  Infectious diseases & outbreaks	Content relating to infectious diseases, epidemics, and outbreaks (e.g., Coronavirus, Zika, and Norovirus).
  Kids' content	Content relating to topics for and about kids. This includes pages targeted at kids (e.g., movies and TV shows for kids, children's books, songs, and toys, etc.) and pages targeted at their parents (e.g., forums and blogs about parenting, traveling with kids, activities to do with kids, children's health, etc.).
  Natural disasters	Content relating to negative news or sentiment around disasters, such as hurricanes, tropical storms, and the aftermath of these catastrophes, such as structural collapses and transit disasters.
  Politics	Content relating to governmental politics.
  Protests & demonstrations	Content relating to protests, demonstrations, brutality, and riots.
  Sensitive social issues	Content relating to sensitive social issues, such as immigration, abortion, euthanasia, vaccines, and other inflammatory content.

Excluded content terms

Note

Not everyone has this feature yet. If you don't, don't worry—it's coming soon!

Excluded content terms block your ads from showing next to unwanted terms (i.e., page titles). They can be added at the account or campaign level, with a maximum of 1000 terms. Any terms you add to your campaign will be automatically applied to all campaigns in your account to save you time later.

For example, if you're selling tech devices and your excluded content term is “faulty tech devices,” then we won't show your ads next to page titles mentioning faulty tech devices.

• Add excluded content terms during campaign creation

  For instructions on adding these terms while creating your Performance Max campaign, see this help page and select the Targeting settings dropdown.

• Add excluded content terms to your account

  1. From the navigation menu on the left, select Tools > Content suitability.
  2. Select Excluded content terms.
  3. Select Add.
  4. Enter your terms, one per line.
  5. Select Save.