About the “Where ads showed” report

Use the “Where ads showed” report to gain more insight into your ad placements, for example, to learn on which channels, videos, or websites your ads showed. The report can be found in the “Where ads showed” tab under “Content” in the left navigation menu and can be viewed at the account, campaign, or ad group level.

This article answers common questions around the “Where ads showed” report.

Note: Don’t use the report as an exhaustive list of placements for your ads, or as an accurate representation of billing. Placements that your ads have shown on only a couple of times may not be included in the report. Also, while Invalid Traffic is removed from most other reports, it may not be removed from the "Where ads showed” report. Learn more about Managing invalid traffic.

FAQs

1. What is a placement?

YouTube: placements are the channels and videos where your ads showed. Placements are only reported for ads appearing on the YouTube Watch page (in-stream ads and YouTube watch next ads). Ads that do not run on the YouTube Watch page (e.g. the YouTube Home feed) are reported as “youtube.com” in the “Where ads showed” report.

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

Display Network: placements are the websites, pages, or apps where your ads showed in the Display Network.
App Ads: placements include YouTube Videos (TrueView), Webpages (GDN), and Mobile Applications (AdMob) where your ads are shown.

2. What does the Youtube.com placement represent?

YouTube ads that do not run on the YouTube Watch page (e.g., the YouTube Home feed) are reported as "youtube.com" in the “Where ads showed” report.

3. How can I view video-level YouTube placements? I can only see channel-level placements currently.

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 checkbox(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 checkbox 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, check the checkbox next to the placement column name to “Select all” checkboxes 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.

4. I’m targeting a YouTube placement and I don’t see any associated Impressions (or Views) in my campaign reporting or the “Where ads showed” report.

Narrow targeting, like individual placements, can result in very low ad traffic. In addition to this, depending on the monetization settings of the video uploader as well as other signals, there are a number of reasons a given placement might not be eligible to serve ads at all. If you don’t see impressions on a given placement, it’s not the best use of time to troubleshoot why that might be. We recommend not assuming that targeting individual placements will always serve a significant number of impressions.

5. What does “Other” mean in the total counts by campaign type?

“Total: Other” is the difference between the total placements reported in Where Ads Showed, and the Total of your Account, Campaign or Ad group (depending on your current view). This difference may be caused by a number of factors including: ads which did not run on YouTube or the Google Display Network, reporting filters applied to the Where Ads showed report, or placements which did not meet the minimum required thresholds for impressions or interactions.

6. Why do I see placements with one view but zero impressions?

You may notice this if an impression was removed because it was classified as invalid traffic, but subsequent reviews determined that it was not invalid traffic. We won’t go back and add the impressions back into reporting. This process typically results in 1 (or a few) view(s) reported despite 0 impressions.

7. Why am I seeing placements that I’m not directly targeting in the report?

This report shows placements you are directly targeting (Manual Placements) as well as the placements where your ads showed via other targeting methods (Automatic Placements). For example, if you’re targeting Females (Demo Targeting) and we serve an ad to a female watching a video that you aren’t manually targeting, this impression would be an “Automatic placement”. Learn more About YouTube ads and view metrics.

8. Why doesn’t my Google Ads placement report show every placement?

Placements are only shown if they meet certain minimum thresholds of impressions or interactions.

9. Why am I seeing “unknown” in the video IDs and the metadata of my video IDs (channel name, channel ID, video name, url)?

Videos on YouTube might be deleted or removed 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.

10. Do the impression counts in the report reflect the impressions in my billing?

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 invalid traffic.

11. Why are placements or videos in a different language than the campaign's language targeting?

You may notice other sites or the audio in the video in different languages even if you’re only targeting English. This is because the language targeting selects the language of the user and not the content of the site they are viewing. Language targeting determines the user’s language primarily from the browser settings.

12. How should I use this report?

The “Where ads showed” report can help you understand if the content that includes your ads is a good fit for your brand message. However, you should exercise caution in interpreting the report for performance reasons. Due to the large number of placements and relatively low number of impressions per placement, performance data in the report is generally not statistically significant. While a placement may look high-performing, it's likely this could just be an effect of high variance in the report. It is therefore not recommended to over-optimize your campaigns based on the results of the report as this can severely limit the inventory available to your campaigns, and lead to less efficient outcomes overall.

13. I’m seeing strange app / placement names. What does this mean?

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 labeling:

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

14. Why do conversion-related metrics in the “Where ads showed” report weren’t matching with any other report?

“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.

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