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What is Blacklisting?

Blacklisting can be compared to entering an office building: you will not be allowed in without an appointment. Even if you have one, you will need an ID to get in. However, some people would not be able to enter even if they provide full information. It happens when they, for some reason, have been added to the Blacklist.

The same principle is used in creating a Blacklist in Media Buying. In this case blacklisting means you prohibit the display of your ads to certain traffic sources or placements.

If there is a certain site that gave you a negative ROI, or if it doesn’t fit the niche where you would like to see your ads, you can add this site to the blacklist.

Using Blacklist is sometimes called “negative targeting” or an “exception list”.

Sometimes you are not interested in getting traffic from a specific source or publisher. If the provider allows it, you can also filter them and blacklist them. Publishers or sources are assigned a specific publisher ID to make it easier for advertising networks and advertisers to find out where their traffic is coming from.

Steps to create a campaign with Blacklist

The steps for blacklisting a site or source are usually the same, regardless of the advertising provider. It should be borne in mind that when blacklisted, you block certain sources, allowing the rest to pass.

Create a campaign as usual for your advertising network.

Get a list of sites or sources that you want to block and put them in a Blacklist location. Later we will discuss how to get copies of these sites and sources.

Save the campaign and wait for approval.

The process is over. The only difficult part is to make or get the blacklist itself.

It’s also important to note that traffic providers usually allow the advertisers to add more elements to their Blacklist, even if the campaign is active at the time, so you don’t need to worry if you missed something.

You can also block the sites and sources that have already delivered the traffic to your page if you find out that they work against you. It is usually done on the campaign statistics panel.

What is the Global Blacklist?

This function is used in case you don’t want  to receive traffic from particular sites or sources from all your campaigns. If you use Global Blacklist, all your past, present and future campaigns will accept no traffic from these blocked sites. However, this option is not available for all advertising networks.

What is Whitelist?

While you can block some sources and allow the rest, you can also do the opposite. This process is called ‘whitelisting’. 

Whitelist allows particular sites to show your ads or provide traffic on your page, while all the rest are blocked.

If there are particular sites or traffic sources that constantly provide positive ROI, and they have a big volume, you can whitelist them and get the main part of your traffic from them.

Besides, Whitelist is very useful if you only want your ads shown on particular sites, especially if those are niche sites that fully match your offer.

Step to create a Whitelist campaign

Adding a Whitelist to your campaign is quite similar to creating a Blacklist and includes the following actions:

Create a campaign.

Get the list of sites and sources you want to receive traffic from, and place them to the Whitelist field.

Save the campaign and wait for an approval.

The process is similar to the Blacklist creation, but the result will be the opposite.

What can be whitelisted or blacklisted?

While creating a campaign, there are also other ways to limit the incoming  traffic.This can be done using proper targeting. The amount of ways to filter and target the incoming traffic depends on the advertising network you are working with. 

For example, for native advertising you can set up the traffic targeting based on geolocation, language, device type, operating system, OS version, and even a category.