To gain more insight about your ad placements, such as learning on which specific channels, videos or websites your ads have appeared, you should use the 'Where ads showed' report.
To find this report, go to Campaigns and then Insights and reports located in the Page menu on the left. Choose When and where ads showed and then select the 'Where ads showed' tab. This will allow you to view the detailed placement data at the account, campaign, or ad group level, helping you understand and optimise your campaign performance.
This article answers common questions around the 'Where ads showed' report.
FAQs
Note: Ads can’t actually appear on channel pages, however, if you use a channel placement for targeting, it can serve on all videos (when they are being watched on the watch page) in a channel eligible to include ads.
Positive placement targeting isn’t available for all video campaign subtypes. Learn how to show your display ad on YouTube
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Display Network: Placements are the websites, pages or apps where your ads showed in the Display Network.
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App Ads: Placements include YouTube videos (TrueView), web pages (GDN) and mobile applications (AdMob) where your ads are shown.
When first opening the report, you’ll get metrics at the YouTube channel level. If you want to see video-level reporting, you can click the tick box(es) next to the channel name(s), then View details. The page will refresh and the new page will have only reporting for channels that you selected via the tick box and a column for 'Placement (Group)', which is the channel, as well as 'Placement (Detail)', which is the video. If you want to see all video-level reporting available, tick the box next to the placement column name to 'Select all' tick boxes and then select View details.
Video-level reporting is available for all YouTube auction and reservation campaigns for video placements that have the minimum number of interactions or views required for reporting.
Videos on YouTube might be deleted or removed for various reasons, including policy violations, privacy setting changes or because the creator deleted the video from their own account.
If a video that the campaign served on is deleted or removed after time of serving, the placement report would show that placement as 'Unknown channel' and include impressions against it.
No. While most other reports are updated to remove detected invalid traffic (which is not billed to your account), the 'Where ads showed' report is not regularly updated and may include invalid traffic. You can check your billing invoices to view your billed impressions.
As a result, impression counts in this report shouldn’t be treated as final. Refer to billing invoices as a source of truth for billable impressions. Learn more about Managing invalid traffic.
You’re probably seeing an 'unformatted app placement'. This impacts apps with invalid app names, leading to placements showing up on the report.
Three types of apps fall into this labelling:
- New apps
- Delisted apps (i.e. apps removed from Play Store/App Store)
- Apps not yet in Store but that are testing ads with AdMob
'Where ads showed' reports are only despammed if the spam is detected immediately, which means that most of the spam isn’t subtracted from this report, since it can arrive days later. This is a known issue and conversions are even more susceptible to it. Conversion data can arrive and be despammed much later, which means that conversions are very unlikely to be despammed.