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Perfomance max placements
Posted by on February 24, 2026 at 7:51 amHi,
I’m currently running Performance Max campaigns and recently reviewed the placements report through the Report Editor.
I understand that Performance Max does not provide full manual control over placements. However, after reviewing the data, I noticed that many of the placements where my ads were shown seem irrelevant and not suitable for my business.
I have already added search themes and audience signals to guide the campaign, but the placements still appear to be low quality and unrelated.
Is there any workaround, strategy, or best practice to improve placement quality in Performance Max campaigns?
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1 Reply
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Account level placement exclusions might work
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You can exclude placements via account-level exclusions. However, don’t get stuck on trying to exclude every single placement that seems irrelevant. In the end, you’re targeting people, not placements. Smart bidding will adjust delivery based on performance, so placements that don’t lead to conversions will automatically fade out.
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placement exclusions are your main lever. go to account-level placement exclusions (not campaign level — pmax doesn’t have that) and build a list of low-quality placements you want to block. you can also submit a request through your google rep for a placement exclusion list if you’re spending at scale, though that’s hit or miss
the other thing that helps is tightening your asset groups. if your assets are too generic, pmax interprets your audience too broadly and serves everywhere. more specific headlines, descriptions, and images that clearly signal who you’re for tends to improve placement relevance over time
audience signals help but they’re suggestions not restrictions — pmax will still go outside them if it thinks it can find conversions
honest answer though: pmax placement control is genuinely limited by design. if placement quality is critical for your business (brand safety, specific verticals etc), standard shopping + search gives you way more control. pmax is a volume play, not a precision play -
Account-level placement exclusions are your only real lever here. Pull the PMax placements report, blacklist the garbage sites/apps, and also exclude all mobile app categories… that alone cleans up a ton of low-quality inventory fast.
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PMax will wander into some pretty junky placements if it thinks it can get cheap traffic there.
You can’t control it directly, but you can tighten it up with account-level placement exclusions, brand exclusions, and stronger audience and conversion signals so it stops chasing garbage clicks.
At the end of the day, judge it on CPA and revenue — if performance sucks and placements look bad, your signals probably aren’t strong enough yet.
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you cannot control placements in pmax, so you control inputs and exclusions. you are right to check placements, low quality inventory can drain spend fast and make smart bidding learn the wrong signals for your business. 1 add account level placement exclusions for mobile apps and categories you do not want, plus brand safety exclusions and negative keywords at account level, 2 tighten asset groups by splitting by product or intent and feed each with strong audience signals built from converters not broad interests, 3 review insights weekly and move clear search winners into a separate search campaign to ring fence high intent traffic; last month we excluded 120 app placements and saw cpa drop from 38 to 24 in three weeks. pmax works best when 60 to 70 percent of conversions come from strong feed and search signals not random display reach.
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Thats what pmax (and a lot of programmatic) does unfortunately!
What sort of business are you in? Who’s your ICP? And is ad placement important to you?
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You can play with the content suitability settings in your account + you also also add keyword exclusions.
Meanwhile I do understand PMAX uses machine learning, but I think that’s what bad actors are trying to exploit and they magically send you ‘visitors’ from those website to fill in your forms with garbage data, so I’m unsure those will die out + if something is really off and the page has 1000s of articles written by chatgpt, I think it’s safe to remove and not just waiting on the AI to eliminate that domain for you -
First thing I always do before running Pmax, is go to Content suitability settings in your tools menu, and exclude all app traffic. That usually cuts out most of the junk traffic. From there, i’ll check the placement report once a week and exclude anything bad.
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Add stronger creative assets and refine audience signals to guide placements
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