Performance Max placements: how to see where your ads ran, and exclude the bad ones

Performance Max spreads one budget across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Most of that is easy to follow. The display part is not: your ads end up on websites and in apps you never chose, and the campaign gives you very little to judge them by.

This guide covers what Google does show you, where to find it, and how to act on it. Everything here was checked against Google's own help pages in September 2026. Google changes these menus often, so the exact labels in your account may drift.

What Performance Max tells you about placements

There are two reports, and they answer different questions.

So you can see where your ads ran, and you can see what each channel cost and returned. What you cannot see is the cost or the conversions of a single website. Google says as much: placement reports "shouldn't be used to evaluate performance" and "should be used as a brand safety tool". Search is not a placement at all and never appears in the report.

That changes how you audit. With a normal Display campaign you can sort by cost and start at the top. With Performance Max you judge placements by what they are and how many impressions they took, and you use the channel report to decide whether the display share is big enough to bother.

Step 1: check whether display is worth your time

Open the channel performance report: Campaigns → Insights and reports → Channel performance, for the Performance Max campaign you care about.

Look at the Display Network row. If it is a few percent of cost, a placement audit is a low priority and your time is better spent elsewhere. If it is a fifth or a quarter of the budget, it deserves an afternoon, because that is money going to sites you have never reviewed.

Step 2: export the placement report

1. Go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → Report editor.
2. Open the predefined report Performance Max campaigns placement.
3. Set the date range to the last 90 days. Shorter ranges hide the long tail.
4. Download it as CSV or Excel.

Google has also started showing Performance Max placements in the standard Where ads showed report (Insights and reports → When and where ads showed). Either export works.

Step 3: read an impressions-only report

Without cost data, you are looking for patterns rather than expensive rows:

• Concentration. How many placements carry most of the impressions? The top of that list is where to look first.
• Type. How much sits in mobile apps? For many advertisers, app inventory is where accidental taps pile up.
• Names. Keyword-stuffed domains, unusual top-level domains and near-misspellings of real publishers are worth opening.
• Unknown volume. A domain you have never heard of that took a large share of impressions should be visited before anything else.

You can do this in a spreadsheet, or drop the file into our free placement exclusion list generator. It recognises a Performance Max report, ranks everything by impressions, shows how much went to apps, and flags suspicious names. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.

Step 4: exclude placements at account level

Performance Max has no self-serve placement exclusions per campaign. The control is the account-level exclusion list, which Google opened to all advertisers in January 2026 and which applies to every campaign in the account, Performance Max included.

1. Go to Tools → Content suitability → Advanced settings.
2. Open Excluded placements.
3. Choose Enter multiple placements and paste your list, one domain per line.

A few details that matter:

• Limits. Up to 20,000 exclusions at a time and 65,000 per account. Manager accounts can build up to three shared lists of 250,000 each, which linked accounts inherit.
• Leave out the www. Google notes that excluding www.example.com does not extend to other subdomains. Enter example.com.
• It is account-wide. Every campaign inherits the list, so check that nothing on it is a site another campaign genuinely needs, a publisher you sponsor for example.

For the full walkthrough of account-level lists, including how to build one from scratch, see the complete guide to account-level exclusions.

Excluding mobile apps from Performance Max

Apps deserve their own decision. For many advertisers, especially outside gaming and app installs, in-app display is the lowest-intent inventory there is: small screens, ads placed next to buttons, and children's games. For some advertisers apps convert perfectly well, so check the channel report and your own conversion data before excluding everything.

If apps are not working for you:

1. Open the account-level exclusion settings.
2. Find the app categories option.
3. Select every category under Apple App Store and under Google Play. There are well over a hundred, and it is a lot of clicking.

The old shortcut, excluding mobileappcategory::69500 to block all apps in one go, does not work at account level. Practitioners who tried it report an error message, which is why the category route is the one that sticks.

Two cautions. Google does not promise that every app impression is caught, so check the placement report again after a few weeks. And if you only want to remove specific apps from a Display campaign, Google's format is mobileapp::2- followed by the Android package name, or mobileapp::1- followed by the App Store ID.

A check you can run this week

1. Channel performance report: note the Display Network share of cost.
2. Export the Performance Max placement report for 90 days.
3. Run it through the free generator and note the app share.
4. Open the twenty most-seen domains you do not recognise.
5. Add the ones you would never have chosen to the account-level list, and decide on apps.
6. Put a reminder in for next month. New junk sites appear constantly, and a list that is never revisited decays.

Where this runs out

An impressions-only report can tell you where your ads ran, but not which of those sites are made for advertising, stuffed with ads or buying their traffic. Answering that means visiting and scoring each site, which is what DisplayGG does, with 100 free credits and no card. If you would rather hand it over, send us the report and we audit your top 100 placements for free.

Running Demand Gen as well? The same account-level list protects it, and there is a separate guide to Demand Gen placements. For YouTube channels, which follow partly different rules, see YouTube exclusion lists.

Sources (Google Ads Help): Placement reports for Performance Max · Channel performance report · Account-level placement exclusions · Brand suitability in Performance Max