About DisplayGateGuard
A tool for finding out where your display budget actually goes — built for Google Display and Performance Max specifically, because the general-purpose brand safety tools are not.
Nenad Franjic
Founder · Performance marketer, Germany · Writes everything published here
I have spent 8+ years buying paid media, most of it on display and video. For nearly five years I ran national campaigns at Deutsche Bahn — awareness, traffic and performance across SEA, display, paid social and video, with annual media budgets up to EUR 10 million. Before that I bought programmatic display at Publicis Media through DV360, The Trade Desk and ActiveAgent. Today I run paid media for automotive brands across DACH and Sweden at a global agency.
DisplayGateGuard came directly out of that work. At Deutsche Bahn I developed methods for assessing media environment quality and placement context, because the reporting we had could not answer a simple question: of the thousands of domains our budget reached last month, which ones would we actually have chosen? That analysis became this tool.
Why GDN and PMAX specifically
Most brand safety and verification tools were built for programmatic buying through demand-side platforms, where you bid into an open exchange and can see the bid stream. I bought that way for years — DV360, The Trade Desk, ActiveAgent — and in that world the tooling works reasonably well.
Google Display works differently. Google controls the inventory, and tools built for the DSP model routinely cannot see or block placements that Google Display serves regularly. I have watched advertisers with full enterprise verification coverage still running on domains no one at the company would have approved. That gap is the entire reason this exists.
Performance Max makes this sharper. PMAX gives you very little placement control inside the campaign itself, so the account-level exclusion list is the main lever you actually have. That is why Google's January 2026 account-level exclusion rollout mattered: one list, applied once, covering every Display and PMAX campaign including ones created later.
How the analysis works
- Your placement report goes in. The export from Google Ads listing every URL your ads appeared on, with impressions, clicks, cost and conversions.
- Each domain is fetched and scored for made-for-advertising characteristics, ad density, content category, brand safety and suitability signals.
- Every score comes with evidence — the category, the confidence, and why it scored that way, so an exclusion is defensible when someone senior questions it.
- You export an exclusion list in the format Google Ads expects and apply it at the account level.
The free placement report tool does the first part of that in your browser — it reads the spreadsheet and shows you where the money went. It never visits a site, so it cannot tell you what those sites actually are. That is the difference between the free tool and the scorer.
What we have actually measured
In a controlled comparison for a large European transportation brand with multi-million euro annual display budgets, we ran two concurrent GDN campaigns — one on a curated placement list, one on the brand's historical placements. The curated campaign drove 52% fewer visits and 7x more revenue per visit, with 4x the conversion rate. The full case study covers what was removed and why we think it worked.
Fewer visits from the right environments outperformed far more visits from the wrong ones. That result is the entire argument for doing this work.
How we make money
The free plan gives you 100 credits and needs no card. Paid plans are published, but billing is not switched on yet — you can reserve a plan and we invoice manually when it opens. Managed analysis, where we run the audit and hand back the list, is quoted per job. No advertising, no data resale, and nothing you upload to the free tool ever reaches us.
Contact
Direct: nenad.franjic@displaygateguard.com. General: info@displaygateguard.com. Or use the contact form — it reaches the same inbox, and you can attach a placement report to it.
Legal details are on the imprint.