If you run Performance Max against a real product feed, you have almost certainly seen the placement report fill with mobile games and domains you have never heard of. That is not a bug. PMax serves across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps, and it will buy the cheapest impressions it can find to hit your goal. Placement exclusions are the one lever that says "not there."
This guide is for a store that already spends on Google — say you run two PMax campaigns on a $6,000 monthly budget — not for someone launching a first campaign. The question that matters is not "how do I add an exclusion," which takes two minutes. It is "how much of my spend is this protecting, and is it worth the reach I give up?"
What placement exclusions actually control
A placement is any specific surface where your ad can appear: a website URL, a YouTube video or channel, a mobile app, or a mobile app category. Excluding one is a negative signal — it removes that surface from the auctions PMax can enter for you.
That matters more in PMax than anywhere else because of where the money goes. smec, which manages over half a billion euros a year in Google spend for more than 350 retailers, reports that 74–97% of PMax cost goes to feed-based Shopping-style ads. The remaining slice — Display and video placements — is where the junk inventory lives. It is a minority of spend, but it is the part with the worst conversion quality, and it is the only part placement exclusions touch.
So set expectations honestly: excluding placements is cleanup, not a turnaround. It trims the Display and YouTube waste. It does not fix a feed problem or a bad target, which is where most PMax underperformance actually comes from.
The limitation nobody mentions until you hit it
Here is the catch the top-ranking guides bury: Performance Max does not support placement exclusions at the campaign level. You cannot exclude a gaming app from one PMax campaign and allow it in another.
Every placement exclusion you set applies at the account level — across every PMax campaign, plus your Search, Display, and Video campaigns at the same time. If you run one PMax campaign for prospecting and another for a tighter target CPA, they share one exclusion list whether you like it or not.
For most POD operators this is fine, because the stuff you want to block (mobile games, parked domains) is junk for every campaign you run. But it means you manage exclusions as an account-wide policy, not a per-campaign tactic.
Where the money leaks: reading the placement report
Before you exclude anything, find out where your spend is going. The PMax placement report lives under Insights and reports > Report editor > "Performance Max campaigns placement," or inside the campaign's Insights tab.
The report has a real weakness the competing articles all flag: historically it shows impressions by placement but is thin on cost and conversions at the placement level, and it dumps a raw, unsorted list that can run to tens of thousands of app IDs. You are hunting for patterns, not auditing every line.
What to look for:
- Mobile app categories eating impressions — gaming apps are the classic offender. In the account-level interface you can block the entire Games category rather than chasing individual app IDs.
- Parked domains and made-for-advertising sites — URLs with high impressions and zero conversions.
- YouTube channels wildly off your audience — kids' content, for example, if you sell to adults.
A worked example: what the junk is actually costing you
Numbers make this concrete. Say your store does 340 orders a month at a $31 average order value, and you run $4,000 of that spend through PMax. Assume the Display/video slice is the low end of smec's range — about a quarter of PMax cost, so roughly $1,000 a month touches non-feed placements.
Now say your placement report shows that a third of that Display spend — about $333 a month — went to gaming apps and parked domains that produced no conversions at all. That is $333 × 12 = roughly $4,000 a year buying impressions that will never buy a mug.
Put it against margin. Say that mug sells for $24 and nets you $9 after base cost, shipping share, and processing — a 37.5% contribution margin, which puts your break-even ROAS at 1 ÷ 0.375 = about 2.67x. To earn back $4,000 of wasted ad spend at that margin, you would need those dollars to have driven roughly $10,700 in sales (4,000 × 2.67). They drove zero. Excluding those placements does not add revenue — it stops a leak, and on thin POD margins stopping a leak is the same as finding profit.
That framing — ad spend measured against true per-order profit, not ROAS — is the whole game. We walk through the full arithmetic in our guide to the economics of Google Ads for an operating store.
How to set placement exclusions, step by step
Account-level exclusions (the main path)
- In Google Ads, go to Tools > Content suitability.
- Open the Excluded content / advanced settings area and choose Excluded placements.
- Paste in the URLs, YouTube channel IDs, or app IDs you pulled from the placement report.
- To block a whole category, add the mobile app category — the Games category is the usual first exclusion.
- Save. It now applies to every eligible campaign in the account.
MCC-level exclusion lists
If you run several accounts from a manager (MCC) account, build a shared placement exclusion list under Shared Library and apply it across sub-accounts. This is how agencies keep a "known junk" blocklist consistent — the same pattern a Google Shopping ads agency uses so every client inherits the same brand-safety floor without re-keying it.
Content suitability settings
Separate from a manual list, the content suitability controls let you exclude broad sensitive categories (tragedy and conflict, mature content, and similar) and tiers of inventory in one switch. For most POD stores, blocking the lowest inventory tiers plus the Games app category clears out the majority of the obvious waste.
Placement exclusions vs. the bigger PMax leaks
Keep this in proportion. If you only have budget for attention in a few places, placement exclusions are not where the largest PMax leak usually is. Two bigger ones:
Brand cannibalization. PMax chases the cheapest conversions, and branded searches are the cheapest of all. Left unchecked it absorbs conversions your organic and brand-search traffic were already getting, then reports a gorgeous ROAS for orders you would have won for free. The fix is account-level brand exclusions, not placement exclusions — a different control. Practitioners estimate 8–15% of PMax budget leaks to brand queries in unprotected accounts.
Feed quality. Since the overwhelming majority of PMax spend is feed-based, your titles, GTINs, images, and price parity decide which auctions you even enter. No amount of placement blocking fixes a weak feed.
Placement exclusions are the brand-safety and Display-cleanup layer. Do them, keep them current, but do them after brand exclusions and feed work. For what else has shifted in the campaign type lately, our recent Performance Max update covers the 2026 changes to reporting and controls, and the rest of our Google Ads economics series runs the numbers on the other levers.
What to exclude and what to leave alone
Exclude aggressively: gaming apps, parked domains, made-for-advertising sites, and any YouTube content obviously outside your audience. These almost never convert for a POD store and the reach you lose is reach you never wanted.
Be careful with: broad Display or YouTube blocks that might be doing upper-funnel work, and anything that actually shows conversions in the report. Chasing a spotless placement list can strangle the reach PMax needs to find buyers. The goal is removing waste, not sanding the campaign down to nothing.
Set a cadence — a monthly fifteen-minute pass over the placement report is plenty for most operating stores. New junk shows up; old exclusions rarely need removing.
Let Victor watch the leak for you
Reading the placement report every month, cross-checking spend against true per-order profit, and keeping the exclusion list current is exactly the kind of recurring, low-glory work that slips. PodVector AI's Victor is an AI employee that operates your Google Ads account directly — it computes true per-order profit on your live data, flags where PMax spend is going to waste, and proposes the exclusions and changes to make.
Every write action is approval-gated: Victor drafts the move, you approve before anything executes, and it can deliver the report to your Google Drive. It is not a dashboard you have to go read — it is an operator that brings the leak to you. Try PodVector AI.
FAQs
Can you exclude placements at the campaign level in Performance Max?
No. Performance Max only accepts placement exclusions at the account level (or via an MCC exclusion list applied across accounts). Any exclusion you add affects every eligible campaign in the account at once, including Search, Display, and Video. If you need genuinely different placement rules for different campaigns, that is a structural argument for splitting work across separate accounts — not something a per-campaign setting can solve.
Where do I find the Performance Max placement report?
Go to Insights and reports > Report editor > "Performance Max campaigns placement," or open the Insights tab inside a specific PMax campaign. Expect a long, unsorted list of URLs and mobile app IDs with impressions shown but limited cost and conversion detail at the placement level. Scan for patterns — categories of junk — rather than trying to judge every single line.
Will excluding placements improve my ROAS?
Sometimes, modestly. Placement exclusions only touch the Display and video slice of PMax, which smec data puts at a minority of PMax cost for retailers. Cutting zero-conversion junk stops a leak and can nudge efficiency, but it will not rescue a campaign held back by feed quality, a mis-set target, or brand cannibalization. Treat it as cleanup, not a turnaround — and judge it on total business profit, not per-campaign ROAS.
How do I block gaming apps specifically?
In the account-level excluded placements interface, add the mobile app Games category rather than listing individual app IDs one at a time. Games are the single most common source of wasted PMax Display spend for POD stores, so this one exclusion usually clears a large share of the obvious junk in a single move.
Do placement exclusions stop brand cannibalization?
No — those are different controls. Placement exclusions govern where ads appear across inventory. Brand cannibalization — PMax eating your branded searches — is handled by account-level brand exclusions plus a dedicated brand Search campaign. If PMax shows a spectacular ROAS while total orders stay flat, that is a brand problem, and placement exclusions will not touch it.
How often should I review placements?
A monthly pass is enough for most operating stores. Pull the placement report, add the new junk to your exclusion list, and move on. You rarely need to remove old exclusions, since gaming apps and parked domains do not become good inventory later. The bigger risk is over-blocking legitimate reach, so resist the urge to exclude anything that is actually converting.