Performance Max campaigns allow advertisers to reach their target audience across all Google channels, such as Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and more, all from a single campaign. This broad reach can significantly boost your ad performance, with some advertisers seeing up to a 10% lift in conversions, according to recent Performance Max campaign statistics.
However, a major downside is limited control over where your ads appear. As a result, your ads might show up on irrelevant placements—like low-quality websites or YouTube videos aimed at kids—leading to wasted spend. That’s why knowing how to exclude placements in Performance Max is crucial. In this blog, we’ll walk you through the exact steps to exclude placements, compare methods, highlight benefits, and share best practices to optimize your PMax campaigns.
Table of Contents
- Understanding Performance Max Placements
- How To Exclude Placements In Performance Max Using Modification Form
- How To Exclude Placements In Performance Max (Account-Level Method)
- Identifying Unwanted Placements for Exclusion using PMax placement reports
- Strategic Approach to Placement Exclusions
- Benefits of Placement Exclusions in PMax
- Conclusion
- FAQs
Understanding Performance Max Placements
Performance Max placements refer to the different Google channels, such as Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Display, and Discover, where Performance Max ads can show up.
Powered by Google’s AI, PMax automatically picks placements based on user intent and your assets.
While this increases reach, advertisers don’t have complete control, so ads may appear on low-quality sites or unrelated apps. Understanding and managing these Performance Max placements is important to avoid wasted spending and ensure your ads reach the most relevant audience.
How To Exclude Placements In Performance Max Using Modification Form
You can request Performance Max placement exclusions by submitting the official PMax modification form. Just provide your contact details, include your customer ID, choose the placement exclusion option, complete the template, and submit the request.
1) Access Requirements
Ensure you have admin or standard access to the Google Ads account. This will help speed up your request processing.
2) Fill Out Contact Details
Enter your contact name and the end customer company name being advertised. This ensures Google knows who the request is for.
3) Specify Access Level and Customer ID
Indicate whether you have admin or standard access, and provide the specific Google Ads Customer ID for the individual account (not the MCC ID).
4) Select Change Type and Action
Choose “Placement Exclusion” as the type of change. Then select “Exclude at the account level” as the specific action, ensuring you apply exclusions at the account scope.
5) Download and Fill the Request Template
Download the ‘PMax: Request template’ Excel sheet and go to the “Placement Exclusions – URL Level” tab. Fill in the action, account ID, and the URLs you want to exclude.
6) Submit and Monitor
Attach the filled template, consent to authorize Google to make the changes, and submit the form. Once Google reviews, monitor your PMax campaign’s Content section to confirm that exclusions are applied.
How To Exclude Placements In Performance Max (Account-Level Method)
With account-level exclusions, you can stop your ads from appearing on specific placements across the Search Partner Network, Display Network, and YouTube. These exclusions take priority over any placements you selected during campaign setup. In other words, if a site is blocked at the account level, your ads will never show there, regardless of individual campaign settings. Since these rules apply account-wide, they affect all campaign types, including Performance Max. Now, let’s look at how to exclude placements in Performance Max using account-level exclusions.
1) Access Your Google Ads Account
Log in to your Google Ads account, and go to the Campaigns section to begin the exclusion process.
Click on Audiences, Keywords, and Content, then select the Content section. Note: This will only appear if you have campaigns like Performance Max, Display, or Video.
3) Edit Exclusions
Scroll down to the Exclusions section and click “Edit exclusions.” You’ll see options for Account, Campaign, and Ad group—select Account.
4) Add Placement URLs
Browse or paste the URLs you want to exclude (from your placement report). Remember, you can add multiple URLs at once.
5) Save and Wait
Save the changes, and the exclusions will take effect within 12 hours. These exclusions apply across all campaign types, including PMax.
6) Use Content Suitability Section
For another approach, go to Tools > Content Suitability, expand Advanced settings, and find Excluded Placements to input or browse URLs. Save your changes, and you’re all set!
Identifying Unwanted Placements for Exclusion using PMax placement reports
In the section above, we learned about the different methods you can use to exclude placements in Performance Max campaigns. But another important question is how to identify which PMax placements to exclude.
The answer is simple: by using PMax placement reports. A Performance Max (PMax) placement report in Google Ads shows where your ads actually appeared across Google’s networks.
Since PMax runs automatically across YouTube, Display, Apps, Search Partners, Discover, and Gmail, you don’t choose placements manually.
The placement report is how you audit and control traffic quality after ads start running.
How to Access the PMax Placement Report
- Go to Campaigns in your Google Ads account.
- Click on Insights and Reports, and then Report Editor.
3. Scroll down to When and where ads showed.
4. Click on Performance Max campaigns placement.
5. The report will open. Select a custom date range. Ensure you select a time frame of at least 3-4 months.
6. You will get a report like this, where you can see whether your ads appear across webpages or mobile apps. You can also identify if your ads are appearing on sites that are Google-owned and operated or across anonymous placements, where specific domain-level details are not available.
That’s it. You have successfully generated the placement report. Remember, this report for PMax placements will only display impressions for all placements.
As of now, Google doesn’t support other metrics such as CTR, CVR, etc.
Once you have the report, check for any low-quality websites or mobile apps that you would like to exclude. Also, check for all those placements that aren’t bringing satisfactory results. Identify all such placements, save them in an Excel sheet, and then, using any of the methods shared above, you can exclude them from your PMax campaigns.
Strategic Approach to Placement Exclusions
It is important to implement these best practices when you want to exclude placements in Performance Max campaigns:
- Regularly monitor your PMax placement reports: Ensure that you keep reviewing your placement reports once in 3-4 weeks. That will help you identify those irrelevant placements that might be wasting your ad spend. Based on that, you can keep updating your exclusion lists.
- Don’t Exclude too many placements: Remember, over-exclusion has a risk of limiting your campaign’s performance. By removing too many placements, you might accidentally remove those websites that may have a lot of potential to help you boost your conversions. Thus, carefully review each placement, how many impressions it has contributed for a significant time period, and only then finalize your decision.
- Use Brand Suitability Features for PMax: Just using placement exclusions might not solve your entire problem. Thus, you can also leverage brand suitability features such as applying negative keywords for PMax campaigns, excluding sensitive content categories, etc., which can help you avoid unrelated, low-quality ad placements.
- Leverage Audience Signals: Audience Signals in PMax can help you guide Google AI toward better placements. Remember, this is not a direct substitute of placement exclusions, but still you can use this to help Google better place and deliver your ads.
- Add a variety of PMax Assets for different placements: As PMax serves your ads across the entire Google Ads inventory, ensure you add optimized assets to cater to all those channels. That will ensure that Google AI creates strong ad combinations for each channel, and never compromises on the placement just because of shortage in assets.
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Benefits of Placement Exclusions in PMax
We will now cover the benefits of excluding placements from your PMax campaigns:
- Avoid wasted ad spend: When your ads aren’t displayed across unrelated or low-quality placements, your ad spend is used efficiently. Otherwise, your ads will keep getting clicks that rarely lead to conversions.
- Improving RoAS: When you direct your ad spend toward better-performing and highly relevant channels, you get more conversions.
- Protect your brand image: Sometimes, when your ads appear across low-reputation websites (which can be sensitive in nature), your brand image gets degraded. These exclusions ensure that your brand identity remains safe.
- Better performance insights: When you remove junk or low-quality placements, your performance data gets cleaner and more reliable. It is much easier to identify which channels are driving results for your business.
- Work around limitations of PMax automation: As most campaign settings are automated in PMax, placement exclusions allow you to guide Google AI toward better-performing Google ads inventory.
Conclusion
We hope this guide on how to exclude placements in Performance Max campaigns helped you. Remember, removing poor placements is important to ensure that your ad spend doesn’t get drained on low-intent traffic that won’t convert or support your business goals.
With the right placement exclusions and monitoring the results over time, you can make your campaigns laser-focused and more efficient.
Best of luck!
FAQs
1. Can I exclude specific placements in Performance Max campaigns?
Direct campaign-level exclusions aren’t available in PMax. However, you can use account-level exclusions or submit a modification request form to exclude specific placements.
2. How do I access the Performance Max Campaign Modification Request Form?
The form is available through Google’s support page, for which we have shared the link above.
3. How long do placement exclusions take to become effective?
Exclusions typically take up to 12 hours to be applied across your campaigns.
4. Will excluding placements affect all my campaigns?
Yes, account-level exclusions apply to all campaigns.
5. Can I exclude entire app categories or content types?
Yes, you can exclude certain app categories and content types using Google’s content suitability settings. These include options like sensitive content exclusions, content themes (e.g., games, religion, politics), and content type exclusions (e.g., live streams, embedded videos).
6. What is the maximum placement exclusion limit for PMax?
You can add up to 20,000 placement exclusions at once, with a total of 65,000 exclusions allowed per account. Manager accounts can make up to 3 exclusion lists, each containing as many as 250,000 exclusions.
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