With the new Google Ads GUI revamp, the Google Ads team also did some reworking of some features around the same time. The main feature we noticed to be different is the settings for the content exclusions. This is where you select categories to exclude your ads from showing on websites based on their content. Categories include sites with specific digital content labels, sensitive content, or specific content types. Google Ads consolidated and reworked the categories and moved where you set them, which can cause confusion. You used to set these at the Ad Group targeting level; now you can simply do it in campaign settings or at the account level.
In old GUI the Google display campaign settings defaulted most categories to on and you could select the red dot icon to turn off any you didn’t like. But, in the new GUI, they’ve gone to a checkbox approach although it’s the opposite of what you might think. Where green meant “include” before, checking a checkbox now means “exclude”.
If you’re an old pro at AdWords, you could easily look at the GUI and set these checkboxes backward because of this Google display campaign settings change.
This could use some addressing with better language and help in our opinion. We spent some time researching and it was not immediately clear how this feature was supposed to behave. It was only when we created a brand new campaign and noticed everything defaulting to off that we realized how it’s now working.
So, in short – checking the box EXCLUDES. Unchecking it INCLUDES.
We recommend checking your exclusions to make sure everything looks right, even if you check the account many times a day. To do this, look under campaign > settings > additional settings > content exclusions
