If you run an operating store on Google Ads, you have seen it: a Performance Max placement report full of mobile game apps and sketchy content sites you never chose. The instinct is to kill them all. That instinct is right — but the payoff is smaller and more specific than the "stop wasting spend" headlines suggest.
This guide shows you exactly how to exclude placements, then does the part competing articles skip: the arithmetic on how much money the cleanup actually frees up, and when it is worth your time versus a distraction from the real levers in your account.
Where Performance Max placements actually live
Performance Max is a cross-inventory campaign. One campaign serves Shopping-style ads from your Merchant Center feed, plus Display banners, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps. "Placements" only refers to that second group — the Display sites, YouTube channels, and apps where your creative assets show up.
Here is the number that reframes everything. smec, which manages feeds for hundreds of retailers, reports that 74–97% of PMax cost goes to feed-based (Shopping-style) ads. For retailers, PMax is mostly a Shopping campaign wearing a trench coat.
So placements — the thing you can exclude — represent the minority of your spend. That does not make exclusions pointless. It means you should size the opportunity before you treat it like an emergency.
How to exclude placements in Performance Max
Google does not let you add placement exclusions to an individual PMax campaign through the normal interface. Exclusions apply at the account level (or across a Manager account). That is the single most important mechanic to understand, because it changes how you think about them — one exclusion list governs every campaign you run.
Step one: find the placements spending your money
Open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Report editor. Scroll to the "When and where ads showed" section and open the "Performance Max campaigns placement" report. This shows every site, channel, and app your assets served on, with impressions.
The honest limitation: this report leans heavily on impressions, not conversions, so it tells you where you showed more than what it cost you. Sort by impressions, and the usual suspects surface fast — generic mobile apps and low-quality content farms with thousands of impressions and nothing to show for them.
Step two: add the exclusions in Content Suitability
Go to Tools, then Content Suitability, expand Advanced settings, and open Excluded placements. Paste in the URLs, YouTube channels, or app IDs you want blocked, and save. The list applies account-wide immediately.
If you manage several accounts under one roof, build the list once under Shared Library and apply it across sub-accounts instead of re-entering it everywhere.
Step three: exclude whole mobile app categories
The biggest offenders are usually mobile apps — ads inside free games where "clicks" are mostly fat-finger taps. You can block an entire category rather than chasing individual app IDs one at a time. Excluding the Games category alone removes a huge swath of the worst placements in a single move.
Step four: the modification request form for large lists
The account-level list has limits. According to AdNabu's placement guide, you can add up to 20,000 exclusions at once, with a total of 65,000 allowed per account. For bigger cleanups, Google provides a PMax modification request form to push exclusions at scale. Most stores never come close to those ceilings — but if you are pasting thousands of app IDs, that is where you go.
The money math competitors skip
Here is what the ranking guides leave out. Walk a real number with me — framed as an example, not a promise.
Say you run $4,000 a month through one Performance Max campaign. Using the middle of smec's range above, roughly 85% of that is feed-based Shopping spend. The arithmetic: $4,000 × 0.15 = $600. That $600 landing on Display, YouTube, Gmail, and apps is the entire pool placement exclusions can touch.
Now say a cluster of mobile game apps burned $180 of that $600 last month with zero orders. Excluding them reclaims that spend for the system to redeploy toward auctions that actually convert. That is a genuine win — and it is also the ceiling. You are optimizing a $600 slice, not the $3,400 feed engine underneath it.
That framing matters because it stops you from treating placement exclusions as the fix for a ROAS problem that lives in your feed, your targets, or your margins.
The profit angle nobody puts on the page
Reclaiming $180 only helps if the spend it moves to clears your break-even. ROAS is not profit — it ignores product cost, fulfillment, and fees — so you need the real number.
Break-even ROAS is simply one divided by your contribution margin. Say you sell a mug at $24 that costs $15 all-in (base, shipping share, processing fees). Your profit is $24 − $15 = $9, a margin of $9 ÷ $24 = 37.5%. Your break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ 0.375 = 2.67x. Below that, every order loses money no matter how clean your placements are.
This is the lens that turns placement cleanup from busywork into a decision. If a reclaimed dollar gets redeployed onto Shopping auctions running above 2.67x, you win. If your whole account sits below break-even, excluding mobile games is rearranging deck chairs — the problem is upstream. We walk the full account version of this in the Google Ads economics guide, and the ROAS-to-profit translation in what the ROAS formula actually tells you.
When a placement exclusion is worth it
Exclude when you see apps or sites with high impressions, real spend, and no conversions over a meaningful window — those are pure leakage. Exclude the Games category almost always; mobile-game inventory rarely converts for POD. And exclude any content that is simply off-brand regardless of the numbers.
Do not exclude reflexively. A placement with few conversions but low spend is noise, not a problem. And remember PMax chases the cheapest conversions it can find, which is also why it tends to drift toward branded search — a bigger blended-ROAS distortion than any app placement, and one that placement exclusions do not touch at all. If your PMax ROAS looks suspiciously great, read whether Google is limiting when your Shopping ads show before you credit the placement cleanup.
It is also worth remembering you are not alone in running the hybrid: Optmyzr's study of thousands of campaigns found most advertisers run PMax alongside Shopping or Search, and split-budget accounts posted the strongest returns. Placement hygiene is one input among several, not the whole game.
How Victor handles placement cleanup
Victor is the AI employee inside PodVector AI, and he operates your Google Ads account directly. He pulls the placement report, flags the apps and sites spending real money with no orders, and adds the account-level exclusions — then redeploys the freed budget toward the auctions clearing your break-even.
The difference is that Victor computes your true per-order profit first. He sees every order, every ad dollar, and every supplier cost from Printify, Printful, or Gelato together, so he knows a mug nets $9 before he decides whether a reclaimed dollar is worth moving. He pauses the losing placements, holds the feed-based spend that performs, and tells you what the cleanup was actually worth — not just that it happened. If you want an operator on this instead of another weekly report, start with Victor.
For stores that would rather hand the whole channel off, we cover the tradeoffs in working with a Google Shopping ads agency.
FAQs
Can you exclude placements at the campaign level in Performance Max?
No. Google applies PMax placement exclusions at the account level (or across a Manager account), not per campaign. One exclusion list governs every PMax campaign in the account. This is the biggest structural limitation to plan around — you cannot block a site for one campaign and allow it in another.
Where is the Performance Max placement report?
Go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Report editor, and open the "When and where ads showed" section. Select "Performance Max campaigns placement." It shows every site, channel, and app your assets served on, weighted toward impressions rather than conversions.
How many placements can you exclude?
Per AdNabu's guide, you can add up to 20,000 exclusions at once, with a total of 65,000 per account. For lists that large, use Google's PMax modification request form. Most stores never approach these limits.
Will excluding placements improve my ROAS?
It can, but only modestly, because placements are the minority of PMax spend — smec reports the bulk of PMax cost is feed-based Shopping ads. Cleaning up junk apps reclaims a slice of the Display and YouTube budget. If your ROAS problem is really a feed, target, or margin problem, exclusions will not fix it.
Should I exclude all mobile apps from Performance Max?
Excluding the Games category is a safe default for most POD stores — that inventory rarely converts and absorbs accidental taps. Blocking every app is more aggressive; some app inventory does convert, so check the report first rather than nuking the whole channel blind.
Do placement exclusions stop Performance Max from eating my brand traffic?
No. Branded-search absorption is a separate issue handled with account-level brand exclusions and a dedicated brand Search campaign. Placement exclusions only govern Display, YouTube, Gmail, and app inventory — not where PMax picks up cheap branded conversions.