Google Ads Performance Max Placement Exclusions

Key Takeaways

Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads used to be a bit of a black box. We never really knew where our ads were showing or what they were showing for. And there definitely wasn't anything you could do about it. But that's been changing over the past couple of years at this point. And one of the big features that they just rolled out is the ability to see where your ads are showing and control what those placements are. So, in this video, I want to walk you through how to find which placements your Performance Max campaigns are showing up for and talk about what you can do to make sure that you're tailoring it to make it brand safe and ideally drive better performance. For this video, we're going to be in one of our live client accounts because there's not going to be anything to show you if we're in a placeholder account, but that also means that we're going to have to have some things blurred out, but you'll still be able to get the gist of everything. So, for placement exclusions in Performance Max, the first thing we need to do is understand where our ads are showing. Now, if you've been running Google campaigns for a while, you probably have a good idea of where those might be. You'd probably head over to the insights and reports section. You'd click on when and where ads showed. You would click on the where ads showed and you would be wrong. This is not where this placement report lives. Even though hopefully someday it will live here, it would make more sense for it to be here. But right now it doesn't. Instead, we need to navigate into the report editor. And then you might see it in my frequently used reports. But if you've not used the performance max campaigns placement report yet, you just need to scroll down into the template library, find the when and where ads showed section, and then use the performance max campaigns report. If I click on this now, we'll be able to see the placements where the performance max ads in this account were shown. Now, if you've run this report before, you're probably pretty familiar that the only stat we get to see is impressions. We do not get to see any other performance metric. You can see conversions is out. If we come over to just the all columns, look at performance. All of these are grayed out. We are not able to add those to this report. At this point, the only thing we can make our decision off of is if these sites are relevant to our business. Now, the first handful here are pretty straightforward. So, eBay, Ask.com, Yahoo, all of those are just regular websites. Now, all of these different assets down here are going to be different versions of placements. If we hover over this, you can see that this is a YouTube channel. Come down here, also YouTube. So, lots of YouTube placements. These are going to be different channels, videos, all sorts of things. And while some of these might make sense just by reading them, there might be some where you need to actually go check it out. It's very easy to get some insights into what these are. All you have to do is click on them and Google will open the YouTube channel, video, website, mobile app, whatever it is in a new window and you can review and see what it is. Overall, this doesn't seem like a terrible placement. Doesn't have anything to do with what we're advertising in this account, but since it's still pretty brands safe and we don't have a ton of impressions on it anyway, no real reason to exclude it. But let's just say we wanted to get rid of a handful of these placements. for whatever reason this startpage.com was a terrible placement or we don't want to show up on eBay then we can easily exclude this from our campaigns but that's just because these are relatively short dotcoms or they're easy to remember but what about all these other placements when I hover over them you'll be able to see the URL in the bottom left of the screen but it's not going to work if you're trying to exclude it and this is all the copy that you have now we can't update any columns as far as I can tell but if you come up and download this report, the file that you get will still have the name that you see in the interface under performance max placement, but it will also give you performance max placement URL. So, you can easily come through here, copy a list of all of the URLs that you want to exclude and not have to worry about doing things peacemail meal in the interface. Once you have that list, it's pretty easy to get these excluded from your performance max campaigns. But it also kind of lives in a place that you might not think. So, if I go back to the campaigns manager, you might think that coming down into the audiences, keywords, and content section would be the place that you would add it because here you can see exclusions. We do have our brand name excluded here, which is why it's blurred out. You can see that's a keyword type. If we come over to edit exclusions, can't really do anything. There's nothing you can do here. And doesn't really make sense to me as to why all of those options are grayed out. But either way, this is not where we will control the placement exclusions for performance max. Instead, we're going to come over to the tools section, go to content suitability, and then there's the inventory type options up here at the top. But down in advanced settings, all the way at the bottom, you'll find excluded placements. Here you can either look through YouTube channels, websites, all that sort of thing, or you can click enter and add in all of those placements that you just found in that placement report and then add them as exclusions to your account. Now, this is one difference. All of these excluded placements will apply to all of your YouTube display network, Google Video Partner, and Search Partner Network inventory. That means that it will also apply in performance max campaigns because all of those networks are included within a performance max campaign. So if I wanted to exclude eBay from this campaign, I would just need to come back in here, go to ebay.com, add the one placement, click save, and then that will be excluded from the entire account. So that needs to make you stop and think about something for a second. If a placement has really terrible content suitability and you shouldn't show your ad on that placement at all, just for brand safety, this is a great option for you to exclude it. Make sure that it's not in your performance max campaigns, but also not in any of your display network campaigns as well. But if the website itself just seems like some place that you might not get good performance, you might want to at least stop and think about what you're excluding because the only metric that you got to see is the number of impressions. And you're going to be excluding that placement for your entire account, not just your singular performance max campaign. At some point, we might get campaign level exclusions for performance max. Wouldn't surprise me, but right now we don't have them. So just stop and make sure that whatever exclusion you're going to add should be excluded at the entire account level, not just that singular performance max campaign. And with that, all you would need to do is click save and everything's applied. But in this instance, I don't actually want to do it because it's not doing any bad performance. And the only other call out that I want to make at this point, if we're talking about excluding placements in performance max, you'll remember Performance Max runs on all networks within the Google environment, including search. You'll see here that the search partner network inventory is also impacted by these placement exclusions. And the only thing that's unclear to me about the performance max placement report is whether or not that includes search partner placements as well. Search partner placement reports are actually relatively new in the Google Ads interface. so new that Joe just released a video just two weeks ago showing that you can now see all of the placements that your search campaigns showed on the search partner network. So basically, I don't know if that performance max placement report includes these search partner placements or not, but what might be a good idea is for you to review the search partner placements in your search campaigns by following the process in this video, which we'll link to at the top of the screen right now, and then adding those as exclusions at your account level so as to impact the placements that you should be showing up on for the Search Partner Network in your Performance Max campaigns. This report, just like the one we just looked at, only shows impressions. It will not show any other metrics. So, you can't see actual performance. But again, if the site is a bad fit for your company, probably shouldn't show on it anyway. And as long as Search Partners are performing well enough on the whole, then maybe it's all right to leave it in there. I'm really enjoying the added controls that Google Ads is giving us for Performance Max campaigns and honestly, some of the other campaign types as well. It's making it a lot easier to be a marketer who's actually doing a good job and being a good steward of my clients brands because now I can get rid of some of those crappy placements in the search partner network while still ideally being able to see some of the good performance that you can get from that network, but also being able to control a lot better where our performance max ads are showing and making sure they're not just showing on a bunch of crap and ending up tarnishing the company name. This process is relatively simple. Shouldn't take you that long. And I would encourage you to do this maybe once a month, once every few months, depending on how much volume you have going through your performance max campaigns. But once you identify those crappy sites, just takes downloading a report, copy, paste, hit save. Really not that difficult to start having much better placements through Performance Max campaigns. If you have any additional questions about controlling your Performance Max campaigns, where they show or anything else in the Google Ads interface, let us know in the comments below. Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. >> If you really really liked it, you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button.