YouTube channel placements can be one of the most costly accidental placements that can really skew performance in a poor direction.

In this post, I’ll show you how to run placement reports for Google Display and Performance Max campaigns and some filters you can use to ensure you’re excluding many irrelevant placements, including kids’ channel placements.

If you haven’t read part 1 in our Placement Exclusions series, make sure to check it out to learn how to pull your placement reports for search campaigns and performance max campaigns.

YouTube Kids’ Channels & Videos

Children-themed YouTube channels have long been a problem for PPC advertisers. We started a shared list of over 1,500 kids channels back in 2018. Since that post was published, YouTube’s global users have gone from 2 billion in 2019 to 2.49 billion users in 2024.

Entertainment for children may seem like a secondary goal for a channel like YouTube, but take a look at the top channel owners of all time.

Cocomelon – Nursery Rhymes, Kids Diana Show, Vlad and Niki, and Like Nastya in the above chat are all kids’ channels.

If you’re a parent or know any child who has been a toddler from 2016 to the present, it’s likely not surprising to you that the most viewed YouTube video of all time is “Baby Shark Dance” by Pinkfong Kids’ Songs & Stories with 13.93 BILLION views as of January 2024. (As of publication, that video shows 15.4 billion views)

Also in the most popular videos of all time are multiple videos from Cocomelon, a song from LooLoo Kids, and “Learning Colors – Colorful Eggs on a Farm”.

It’s easy to exclude these basic top channels and popular videos, but there are millions more where that came from and they’re likely in your placement reports, too.

How to Use Filters In Placement Reports

Grab one of your existing placement reports. I like to run filters for the Placement column to find the kid videos quickly. If you’re not familiar with filtering, use the funnel-like icon, which will add drop-down options to your column headers.

Kids Placements

If the list below is too long for you, I have bolded the most important words that I find will weed out a good chunk of the traffic. These words include kids, baby/babies, toddler, toy, play, and nursery. If you want more, add in some synonyms or use Google Translate to add in Spanish versions.

In the Performance Max report I was running in Part 1 of this series, filtering for “kid” quickly found 1,983 placements.

I like to work through my filters and highlight everything I’m interested in excluding in red for easy filtering.

For Display reports, filter the Type column for YouTube channel and then start running the word filters on the Placement column. Below is an example from a legacy account that has had many exclusions applied for kids’ channels. The screenshot below shows what pops up when I filter for “kid”.

I work through my list and highlight any placements I’m interested in excluding in red for easy filtering.

Let’s see what else we can filter for to weed out other placements:

Foreign Placements

Symbols

Á – accent or tilde letters

Extensions like .br or .xyz

Emojis

Sorting

High to low for:

Impressions

Clicks

CTR of >100%

Conclusion

It’s important to keep your eyes open for other themes based on your business. There are likely additional keywords you can add to your filtering list to make sure your ads aren’t appearing where you don’t want them.

Keep your sheets handy, as you’ll need the individual placement URLs to add to your placement exclusion lists which we’ll cover in part 3 of our series!