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.
FAQs
1. What is a placement?
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), web pages (GDN) and mobile applications (AdMob) where your ads are shown.
2. What does the Youtube.com placement represent?
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 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.
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.
5. What does 'Other' mean in the total counts by campaign type?
6. Why do I see placements with one view but zero impressions?
7. Why am I seeing placements that I’m not directly targeting in the report?
8. Why doesn’t my Google Ads placement report show every placement?
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 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.
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?
12. How should I use this report?
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 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
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.