If you run an operating store with real Google Ads spend, you have almost certainly seen it: a placements report full of mobile games, sketchy made-for-advertising domains, and random kids' apps eating impressions. This guide shows you where to cut them, the account-wide gotcha nobody flags, and how to decide whether the cleanup is even worth your time — framed around profit, not vanity metrics. For the full picture on how these campaigns earn their keep, start with our Google Ads economics guide.
Where placement exclusions actually live in Performance Max
Most advertisers look for an "exclusions" tab inside the PMax campaign and never find a clean one. That is because Google keeps placement exclusions at the account level. The setting sits under content suitability, where it governs every campaign you run, not just the PMax one annoying you today.
You can exclude four kinds of inventory: specific websites, individual YouTube videos, entire YouTube channels, and mobile apps or whole app categories. The placements report is where you find the offenders — it shows you the placement name and impressions, and not much else.
That reporting thinness is the first thing competing guides gloss over: the PMax placements report gives you impressions, but no clicks, spend, or conversions per placement. So you are excluding on a hunch about brand fit, not a clean per-placement ROAS. Treat it as a brand-safety and junk-filtering tool, not a precision profit scalpel.
Step by step: excluding placements at the account level
Here is the exact path in the current Google Ads interface:
- Click the Tools icon, then open Content suitability.
- Expand Advanced settings and find the Excluded placements section.
- Choose the Enter tab and paste your list of website URLs, YouTube channel or video IDs, or app IDs — bulk paste is supported.
- Click Save. Exclusions typically take effect within about half a day.
There is a second route for the same destination: under Campaigns > Audiences, keywords and content > Content, open the Exclusions tab, pick the Account level, and paste the same list. Both write to the same account-level list.
To knock out mobile gaming — the single largest category of junk placements for most retailers — you can exclude the whole category by its ID (mobileappcategory::69500), a tactic smarter-ecommerce documents in its placement-exclusion walkthrough.
The catch no one explains: exclusions are account-wide
This is the part that matters most for an operating store and the part the SERP leaders bury in a sentence. Because placement exclusions live at the account level, you cannot exclude a placement for one PMax campaign and keep it for another.
Say you run a profitable Display-free feed PMax for your bestsellers and a separate experimental PMax that you want reaching YouTube. Blocking a YouTube channel for the first campaign blocks it for the second too. If you genuinely need per-campaign placement control, your only real lever is campaign structure — a feed-only PMax that never touches those placements in the first place (more on that below).
You also get generous headroom on list size. Lunio's placement guide notes that standard accounts can add up to twenty thousand exclusions at once and hold tens of thousands in total, while manager accounts can build shared exclusion lists far larger than any single store will ever need. Capacity is not your constraint; knowing what to exclude is.
Check the channel report before you exclude anything
Here is the diagnosis step that separates a useful afternoon from a wasted one. PMax now has a channel performance report that breaks spend and results out by Google Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Maps, Gmail, and Search partners — data viewable in Google Ads for ranges since mid-2025. Open it before you touch exclusions.
Why? Because for retailers, PMax is mostly Shopping under the hood. smec, which manages feeds for hundreds of retailers, reports that between seventy-four and ninety-seven percent of PMax cost goes to feed-based, Shopping-style ads. Placement exclusions only touch the Display, YouTube, and app slice — which may be a small fraction of your spend.
So the channel report tells you the size of the prize. If it shows ninety-plus percent of your PMax cost landing on Search and Shopping, aggressive placement cleanup is low-leverage busywork. If it shows a fat Display or YouTube line converting at near-zero, you have a real problem worth fixing. We go deeper on reading these breakdowns in our Performance Max reporting guide.
What a wasted placement actually costs you
Let's put real operating numbers on it, because the profit angle is exactly what every ranking guide skips.
Say your store does 420 orders a month at a $29 average order value, spending $3,400/month across Google. Your typical tee nets about $11 after base cost, shipping share, and processing on that $29 price — a contribution margin of $11 ÷ $29 = 37.9%. That makes your break-even ROAS 1 ÷ 0.379 = 2.64x. Below that return, every order loses money.
Now your channel report shows $510 of that $3,400 went to Display and mobile apps, and the placements report is wall-to-wall mobile games. Those placements rarely produce buyers for a $29 apparel product. If that $510 converted at, say, a 0.9x ROAS — $459 of revenue on $510 of spend — you lost money on the spend and the revenue it did produce sat far below your 2.64x break-even.
Excluding that junk does two things. It redirects that spend toward Shopping auctions that clear break-even, and it cleans the conversion signal smart bidding learns from, so the system stops chasing cheap, non-buying clicks. The arithmetic, not a dashboard, tells you whether the cut is worth making — and it almost always is once a placement line is both large and unprofitable.
Feed-only Performance Max: the blunt instrument
When account-level exclusions feel like whack-a-mole, the cleaner fix is structural. A feed-only PMax — a campaign built with no image, video, or text assets, just your Merchant Center feed — largely confines serving to Shopping inventory and sidesteps the Display and YouTube placements entirely.
The trade-off is reach. You give up the multi-channel upside PMax is pitched on. For a lean POD team that mostly wins on Shopping anyway, that is usually a fair trade. For a store leaning on YouTube for discovery, it is not. Decide based on your channel report, not a blog's blanket advice.
One more lever lives beside placements: campaign-level negative keywords now exist for PMax, though the cap sits around a thousand negatives per campaign. Pair a tight negative list with brand exclusions and feed-only structure, and you have far more control than the "PMax is a black box" crowd admits. If you are weighing whether to keep scaling PMax at all this quarter, our note on building a Performance Max cushion walks the margin math.
Building and maintaining your exclusion list
Pull the placements report monthly, sort by impressions, and exclude the obvious junk: mobile game apps, auto-generated content farms, and anything wildly off-brand. You will never catch every bad placement — new ones spawn constantly — so treat this as hygiene, not a one-time project.
The honest limit: because the placements report has no per-placement spend or conversion data, you are excluding on brand fit and pattern recognition, not clean economics. That is fine for junk removal. It is not a substitute for watching your break-even ROAS and total-business profit, which is where the real decisions get made.
This is also the kind of recurring, unglamorous ops work an AI employee is built for. Victor, PodVector AI's AI employee, connects to your Google Ads and Shopify, computes true per-order profit across your live data, and can surface the Display and app spend that is quietly bleeding margin — then draft the placement exclusions for you to approve before anything changes in your account. Every write action is approval-gated: Victor proposes, you approve, it executes, and the resulting reports land in your Google Drive. Victor is not a dashboard you log into; it is an operator you delegate to. When you are ready to hand the feed and bid work to a specialist instead, see how a Google Shopping ads agency compares.
FAQs
Can I exclude placements for just one Performance Max campaign?
No. Placement exclusions in Performance Max are account-level only, so any placement you exclude is excluded across every campaign in that account. The only way to get campaign-specific behavior is to change structure — for example, running a feed-only PMax that never serves on Display or YouTube placements to begin with.
Where exactly do I add the exclusions?
Go to Tools > Content suitability, open Advanced settings, expand Excluded placements, paste your list of websites, YouTube channels or videos, and app IDs, then save. You can reach the same account-level list through Campaigns > Audiences, keywords and content > Content > Exclusions. Changes usually apply within about twelve hours.
How do I find the bad placements to exclude?
Open the Performance Max placements report. It shows placement names and impressions — it does not show clicks, spend, or conversions per placement. So you are filtering for brand fit and obvious junk (mobile games, content farms, off-brand sites), not for precise ROAS. Cross-reference it with the channel performance report to see how much of your spend the Display and app slice even represents.
Will excluding placements improve my ROAS?
It can, but only to the extent that bad placements are actually consuming meaningful spend. If your channel report shows the Display and YouTube slice is a tiny share of a Shopping-dominated PMax, cleanup barely moves the number. If that slice is large and converting below your break-even ROAS, trimming it both saves wasted spend and cleans the signal smart bidding learns from. There are no guarantees — judge it against your own break-even math.
Is a feed-only Performance Max better than excluding placements?
For stores that mainly convert through Shopping, often yes — a feed-only campaign avoids the junk placements entirely instead of blocking them one by one, and it keeps the exclusion list from becoming a maintenance treadmill. The cost is reach: you forgo the Display, YouTube, and Discover exposure PMax is sold on. Let your channel report and margin targets decide, not a one-size-fits-all rule.