The Google Ads Placement Exclusion Audit
Every placement your budget reaches that no buyer of yours will ever see, and the four settings that stop it: content suitability, mobile app categories, the account-level exclusion list, and the weekly recheck.
Who this is for
- Shopify and WooCommerce stores running PMax or Demand Gen
- Anyone whose Display CTR looks great and whose Display revenue does not
- Operators who inherited an account and have never seen its placement report
Why this exists
Display, Demand Gen and PMax place your ads across apps, games and video channels you never picked. Most of that inventory is cheap for a reason: it produces clicks and almost no orders. This is the pass Ad-Lab runs on every new account, and it usually finds a double-digit share of spend going somewhere the customer will never be.
Start from the report, not from a list someone gave you
Exclusion lists copied between accounts are guesses. Your own placement report is evidence. Pull it first, sort by cost, and let the account tell you where its money is going before you exclude anything.
1. Find the placements
Open the placement report
Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Where ads showed. Set the date range to the last 30 days and sort by Cost, highest first. This is the only view that shows apps, sites and channels together.
Add the columns that matter
Cost, Clicks, Conversions and Conversion value. Without conversions in the view you are looking at traffic, not waste. A placement with spend and zero conversions over 30 days is the thing you are hunting.
Read the top twenty rows
Twenty is enough. Waste concentrates: a handful of placements normally carry most of it. If a row is an app name you do not recognise, a game, or a channel aimed at children, it is a candidate.
2. The four settings that actually stop it
3. What to exclude, and what to leave alone
When a row is borderline, leave it and look again in a week. Over-excluding starves the campaign and is harder to undo than one more week of a small spend.
| Pattern in the report | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A mobile game with spend and no conversions | Exclude | Accidental taps on a game screen are not shopping intent |
| A children's video channel | Exclude | Clicks come from a viewer who cannot buy |
| A site whose name is a string of keywords | Exclude | Made for advertising, not for readers |
| A real publisher in your niche, spend and some conversions | Keep | This is the inventory you actually want |
| A placement with spend and no conversions but only a few clicks | Wait | Not enough data yet; check it again next week |
PMax and Demand Gen are the reason this matters more than it used to
PMax obeys account-level placement exclusions and content suitability settings, and ignores most campaign-level ones. Demand Gen reaches the same app and video inventory. So the account-level settings above are doing the work on the campaign types that spend the most, which is exactly why an account nobody has audited leaks here.
4. Keep it from coming back
Recheck weekly, ten minutes
New placements appear constantly. Sort the last seven days by cost, scan for anything new with spend and no conversions, and add it to the account-level list.
Watch the share, not the list length
The number that matters is what share of spend went to placements you would not have chosen. If that share is falling week over week, the routine is working. A long exclusion list on its own proves nothing.
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