Brand Safety Targeting | Outbrain DSP Help Center

Brand Safety is a new brand safety feature in the Outbrain DSP dashboard available on the account level. It allows you to manage brand safety settings in one accessible interface, helping you better control where your ads appear.

Product Overview

Brand Safety combines first-party and third-party pre-bid solutions, allowing you to select between three different pre-set inventory filters - from most to least strict - based on your unique needs.

Each filter consists of different pre-bid inventory limitation guardrails, ranging from contextual exclusions to fraudulent traffic blocks to manually approved allowlists. The solution combines our first-party solutions with third-party contextual mechanisms (Verity via GumGum).

Important: While we apply inventory controls as effectively as possible, we can't guarantee that all content and publishers will be compliant or aligned with your unique brand suitability needs. If you or your clients have any specific requests for additional blocks, please make sure to still use other available custom measures of inventory limitations (blocklists, 3rd party post-bid tracking).

Available Inventory Filters

Inventory Filter	Description
Expanded inventory (selected default)	Excludes the following inventory and content: Globally blocked websites: We periodically review suspicious activity across publishers, ASNs, and IPs and maintain a global blocklist that is automatically excluded across our ecosystem. Real-time suspicious activity: Our bidding algorithms analyze suspicious activity such as high click-through rates, low conversion rates, and click discrepancy, and proactively block traffic according to these metrics in real-time on multiple levels, including: Publishers Placements Tag IDs ASN ranges IP addresses
Standard inventory	Excludes the same inventory as Expanded, as well as: Content with a high risk of promoting the following topics (based on 3rd party segmentation from Verity): Obscenity, hate, sexually explicit content, or drugs Non-categorized websites: Websites and apps that have not yet been categorized Apps with less than 5k installs and a rating lower than 3.5 on the app stores
Limited inventory* Keep in mind that this filter might severely limit your reach. It is recommended that you use it on campaigns that are not already targeting a pre-defined publisher group or advanced targeting segmentation.	Excludes same as Standard, as well as: Content with a moderate risk of promoting the following topics (based on 3rd party segmentation from Verity): Obscenity, hate, sexually explicit content, or drugs Only includes: Websites that are periodically manually reviewed and categorized as brand-safe.

Until February 2024, all Brand Safety targeting will be free of charge. Starting in February, all ad groups on accounts with the Limited inventory setting enabled will incur a 2% of media spend, reported as data cost.