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Customizing For Your Vertical

John Williams edited this page Jul 20, 2026 · 1 revision

Customizing for Your Vertical — Adapt the Placement Guardian to Any Industry

The Negative Placement Guardian ships tuned for a beauty / facial / med-spa brand targeting women 25–55. Every vertical has different "wrong inventory" — this page shows two ways to retune it: using Claude (2 minutes) or manually.

Option A — Customize with Claude (recommended)

Paste the script into Claude (or any capable AI assistant) with this prompt — fill in the three brackets:

I'm attaching a Google Ads Script that automatically excludes bad placements
from Display, YouTube, and Performance Max campaigns. It's currently tuned
for a beauty/facial brand.

My business: [WHAT YOU SELL — e.g. "B2B SaaS for accountants"]
My target customer: [WHO BUYS — e.g. "finance professionals 30–60, US"]
Never exclude: [YOUR OWN PROPERTIES / KNOWN-GOOD SITES]

Please rewrite ONLY the BLOCK_PATTERNS and ALLOWLIST arrays in the CONFIG
section for my vertical:
1. Keep the universal junk-inventory patterns (mod apk, wallpaper, ringtone,
   fake call, free coins, cheat, hack)
2. Replace the beauty-specific and audience-specific patterns with ones that
   are misaligned for MY audience
3. Keep patterns short and generic enough to catch variations, but not so
   short they'd match legitimate placements (e.g. 'game' also matches
   'gamechanger' — flag any risky patterns you include)
4. Add my never-exclude properties to ALLOWLIST
5. Don't change any other part of the script

Return the complete updated CONFIG block only.

Paste the returned CONFIG block over the original, run once with DRY_RUN: true, review the sheet, then go live.

Pro tip: after your first weekly report, paste the flagged-placements list back into Claude and ask "which of these look like false positives for my vertical, and what allowlist/pattern changes would fix them?" — the script gets smarter every week with about 90 seconds of effort.

Option B — Customize Manually

Everything you touch lives in the CONFIG block at the top. The two arrays:

BLOCK_PATTERNS — what gets excluded on sight

Each entry is a case-insensitive regex tested against the placement URL + app name + channel/video title. Rules of thumb:

  • Think in three buckets: (1) wrong-audience content, (2) low-intent environments, (3) universal junk. Keep bucket 3 from the shipped list — it's vertical-agnostic.
  • Short but not too short. 'kid' catches kids/kidz/forkids — good. 'art' would catch smartwatch — bad. Test mentally against compound words.
  • Spaces are part of the regex. 'idle ' (trailing space) matches "Idle Miner" but not "idlewild".

Vertical starter ideas:

Vertical Add patterns like…
B2B SaaS celebrity, gossip, viral, quiz, astrology, soap opera, fan page
Luxury goods coupon, discount, free stuff, sweepstake, deal finder, penny
Legal / medical meme, prank, funny video, fail compilation, plus anything sensational
Kids' products (inverted!) Remove the kids patterns entirely — that's your audience — and block dating, casino, crypto instead
Home services celebrity, kpop, anime, fan cam, unboxing toys

ALLOWLIST — what can never be excluded

Add your own domains, YouTube channels, and app names, plus partner properties. Allowlist beats blocklist every time — one entry protects forever.

Thresholds worth adjusting per vertical

  • MIN_SPEND_NO_CONVERSIONS — set to roughly half your target CPA. A $500-CPA law firm shouldn't exclude at $10; a $30-CPA ecommerce brand shouldn't wait for $100.
  • LOOKBACK_DAYS — long sales cycles (B2B, legal) deserve 120–180 days before declaring a placement a zero-converter.
  • CTR_ANOMALY — 5% is right for Display; loosen to 8–10% if you run a lot of native-style inventory where higher CTRs are legitimate.

Testing Your Changes

  1. Set DRY_RUN: true
  2. Run and read every row of the report — the Reason column tells you exactly which pattern fired
  3. False positives → refine the pattern or add to ALLOWLIST
  4. Flip DRY_RUN: false, run, schedule weekly

By AHMEEGO™ / It All Started With A Idea LLC — makers of Buddy, the Google Ads AI Agent. Questions? r/ppc_.