You added the domain to your exclusion list. It is still in this week's placement report. Before assuming Google ignored you, work through these in order. In our experience the cause is almost always one of the first three.
Checked against Google's documentation in September 2026.
1. Did the impression happen before the exclusion?
Exclusions apply going forward. They do not remove impressions you already bought, and a report covering the last 30 days still contains everything that ran before you made the change.
Narrow the date range to start the day after you added the exclusion. If the placement disappears, nothing is broken.
2. Is the identifier the right type?
Placements are not all domains, and each type has its own format.
| Placement type | What the exclusion needs |
|---|---|
| Website | The domain, without protocol: example.com |
| Mobile app | mobileapp::2- plus the Android package name, or mobileapp::1- plus the App Store ID |
| YouTube channel | The channel ID, which starts with UC, not the handle or the channel URL |
| YouTube video | The video ID or URL |
A list built from a placement report is a list of domains, and domains do not exclude YouTube channels. That single mismatch accounts for a lot of "it did not work", and it is covered in the YouTube exclusion guide.
3. Did you exclude www.example.com?
Google notes that keeping the www. narrows the exclusion: www.example.com does not extend to the site's other subdomains. Enter the bare domain, example.com, and the subdomains come with it.
This also explains the reverse case, where news.example.com keeps appearing after you excluded what you thought was the whole site.
4. Where does the exclusion actually live?
Four controls carry similar names and cover different campaigns. An exclusion in the wrong one looks exactly like an exclusion that does not work.
- Account-level excluded placements (Tools → Content suitability → Advanced settings) cover every campaign in the account, including campaigns created later.
- Shared lists from the Shared library only cover the campaigns you attached them to. New campaigns do not inherit them.
- Campaign or ad group exclusions cover that campaign only.
- Manager account lists are inherited by linked accounts, so check the manager account before concluding the child account is misconfigured.
The complete guide to exclusion lists has the full comparison and the paths.
5. Does the campaign type support what you did?
- Performance Max has no self-serve campaign-level placement exclusions. The account-level list is the lever, and PMax does respect it.
- Demand Gen: Google says topic and placement exclusions are not generally available at campaign or ad group level, so account-level is again the place. See Demand Gen placements.
- Search partner websites are placements, and Google documents account-level and manager-account exclusions applying to them since March 2024. Ordinary Search results are not placements and are unaffected either way.
- Apps can be excluded individually or by category, and the one-click
mobileappcategory::69500shortcut does not work at account level. See Performance Max placements.
6. Are you reading more into the report than it holds?
Google says the "Where ads showed" report is not an exhaustive list of placements and not an accurate representation of billing, and that placements with only a couple of impressions may not appear at all. A Performance Max placement report is impressions only, with no cost or clicks.
So a domain showing a handful of impressions after exclusion may be reporting lag or attribution to a parent domain rather than a failure. A domain still taking thousands is worth escalating.
When the exclusion is fine and the problem is the list
If every check passes and new unwanted domains keep arriving, nothing is broken. The exclusions worked; the inventory refreshed. Junk domains are created continuously, which is why a list built once and never revisited decays.
That is the loop worth automating: pull the report, review what is new, add what fails, repeat. The free placement report cleaner does the triage in your browser without uploading anything, and DisplayGG visits and scores the domains when the question is what a site actually is rather than what it cost.
Sources (Google Ads Help): Exclude placements at the account level · About the "Where ads showed" report · Placement reports for Performance Max