What is Keyword Blocking?
What is keyword blocking?
The ability to block websites based on keywords is an essential component of any web filter. It ensures users are not exposed to inappropriate or offensive content while allowing them to stay focused on their work, which is a crucial part of any digital marketing campaign.
Using keyword blocking to block website content can be a valuable tool for advertisers and agencies, but it can also have negative consequences for publishers who rely on the revenue from advertising. A recent study revealed that brands and publishers alike are seeing a lot of negative impact from keyword blocking, including denying ad revenues to LGBTQ+ news publishers and deterring engagement with Black Lives Matter protestors and positive LGBT stories.
While brand safety is a high priority for advertisers, it’s not always easy to keep up with the ever-changing nature of the media landscape and new news. It’s therefore essential to have a strategy that enables marketers to stay ahead of the curve and remain effective throughout the campaign cycle.
To help marketers navigate this challenging environment, many advertising and ad technology vendors offer different types of keyword blocking solutions. These can range from simple content category blocking to more sophisticated and granular methods.
Some solutions, such as Integral Ad Science and Oracle Contextual Intelligence (previously Grapeshot), provide a semantic keyword blocking solution that takes both the context and sentiment into account when creating exclusions. Homonyms like Die (to cease living) and Shoot (as would a gun) are avoided without context, while cheq reports that more than three quarters of neutral or positive LGBTQ+ news is incorrectly flagged by block lists.
These contextual keyword blocking solutions ensure that brands can continue to appear adjacent to relevant and engaging stories, while also ensuring publishers don’t miss out on lucrative ad revenue opportunities. It also helps advertisers be smarter with their ad spend and increase the efficiency of their campaigns.
A large number of trading desks have dated and overly restrictive keyword blocklists that inhibit efficiency and reduce the potential reach of a campaign. They are often created by an automated tool or inherited from previous agencies, and include a wide range of words that are unlikely to be used in brand safe content.
As a result, advertisers are missing out on the best opportunities to be in front of ad-interested consumers. This includes ad placements that have been designed specifically to capture the interest of specific audiences such as those promoting travel deals to the strip or tips on where to catch the best fourth of July fireworks.
Unfortunately, these ad positions are frequently being missed because marketers are focusing on short-term efficiencies and neglecting the long-term impact of their keyword blocklists. This approach has the potential to notably impact marketer’s spend, reduce their reach and deprive advertisers of valuable brand safe inventory that could have been opened up to them if only they took a more thoughtful approach to their keyword blocking.
