How Placement Exclusions Works
Placement exclusions can be applied at the campaign or ad group level, or globally via a Shared Negative Placement List applied across the account. They accept website URLs, YouTube channel URLs, YouTube video URLs, and mobile app/app category identifiers. In Google Ads, you can also exclude entire content categories (gambling, violent content, sexually suggestive content) and audiences from specific content types. Mobile app traffic is a notorious source of wasted GDN spend, apps generate high impression volumes and click rates from accidental taps, particularly on mobile games. Excluding "mobileapps.googlesyndication.com" and "adsenseformobileapps.com" eliminates this traffic category.
Why Placement Exclusions Matters for B2B Marketing
For B2B advertisers, placement exclusions are arguably the most impactful ongoing optimization action in Display campaigns. GDN's automatic placement algorithm distributes spend broadly, including low-quality, brand-unsafe, and non-professional inventory. B2B campaigns regularly accumulate spend on entertainment sites, gaming apps, coupon sites, and low-quality content farms that have zero B2B audience relevance. A thorough placement exclusion audit on a new GDN campaign typically identifies 20-40% of spend going to placements with zero conversions and below-average engagement metrics.
Placement Exclusions: Best Practices & Strategic Application
Best practices for B2B placement exclusions include: reviewing automatic placement reports weekly in the first month of campaign launch and adding non-converters with 50+ clicks to the exclusion list, maintaining a master shared exclusion list applied to all Display campaigns in the account, adding mobile app traffic exclusions immediately at campaign launch (don't wait for wasted spend data), excluding entertainment, gaming, sports, and children's content categories as standard B2B hygiene, and importing community-maintained GDN exclusion lists as a starting point before adding account-specific exclusions.
Agency Perspective: Placement Exclusions in Practice
MV3 Marketing applies a standard B2B exclusion list template to every new Display campaign at launch, covering mobile app domains, known click fraud networks, entertainment categories, and irrelevant content verticals. This preemptive exclusion strategy prevents the first 30 days of campaign data from being polluted by obviously wasteful placements, accelerating the timeline to meaningful conversion data.
