ᴎils rooijmans

 

After conducting audits over hundreds of PMax campaigns, I know that over 80% of them still make this mistake; they DON’T exclude Mobile App placements.

Remember, Performance Max campaigns maximize your _spend_, NOT your profits.

Here’s WHY you want to exclude mobile apps from your Performance Max campaigns:

1. 1. Irrelevant App placements: Your ads almost always appear in apps that are unrelated to your product or service, this is a waste of your budget.
   2. Low-quality clicks: Ads on Mobile Apps mostly lead to accidental clicks that have zero none conversion value, this is true especially for gaming apps (the majority of App placements).
   3. Budget allocation: Mobile Apps can consume a big part of your budget. By excluding them, you can allocate your budget to placements with higher conversion value.
   4. Brand safety: Not all apps are a good fit for your brand’s values or brand safety guidelines.

Here’s HOW you can exclude All mobile apps from your Performance Max campaigns:

1. 1. In the Google Ads UI, select the All campaigns view
   2. In the left navigation, select ‘Audiences, keywords and content -> Content’
   3. Go to ‘Exclusions’
   4. Click ‘Edit exclusions’
   5. Select ‘Account’ (NOTE: PMax placement exclusions can only be added at the account level, NOT at the level of individual PMax campaigns)
      
   6. Select ‘App categories (140)’

      

   7. Expand ‘Apple App Store’
   8. Check all boxes for all categories (NB: make sure to expand any category that shows the drop down arrow, this will show the sub-categories that also need to be ticked)

      

   9. Expand ‘Google Play’
   10. Check all boxes for all categories (Again, make sure to expand any category that shows the drop down arrow, this will show the sub-categories that also need to be ticked)

       

   11. The selected total should show 140!
   12. Hit Save

       

   13. You’re done.

Yes, that is a lot of clicking to be done….

Unfortunately, the little trick of entering ‘mobileappcategory::69500’ in your placement exclusions to exclude All Apps in a single click does not work at the account level. Currently, the Google Ads UI throws “An error occurred. Please try again or check your targeting options” when you try to save the exclusion.

Also, Google Ads Editor does not (yet) allow us to add exclusions at the account level.

As far as I know, this is currently the only way.

 

 

Today, I had to fix some URL tracking parameters for one of my clients.

Manually fixing UTM parameters to contain the campaign name is Groundhog Day of drudgery. Copy-pasting campaign names in the tracking template or URL suffix is extremely time-consuming and a guaranteed recipe for disaster when you forget to add them to newly created campaigns.

So, why not… Just Script It?

Here’s the script I used to solve my miseries…

What it does:

This Google Ads script provides methods to automate the inclusion of UTM parameters like source, medium, and your campaign name in the Final URL Suffix and ValueTrack parameters. 

Why you’d care:

GA4 can report clicks from Google Ads, and attribute them to the right campaigns IF you have linked GA4 to Google Ads and auto-tagging enabled, AND the user has given consent to do so.

Auto-tagging and GA4 rely on the gclid identifier for tracking, but privacy restrictions and user consent requirements may prevent its processing. When this happens, the campaign attributed to such a session may be labeled as (not set) or occasionally as (organic). Some browsers may remove the gclid parameter in enhanced privacy modes. This can disrupt data collection, leaving gaps in your campaign performance insights.

Adding the right UTM parameters to clicks from your Google Ads account prevents this from happening, and (partly) recovers lost data.

Why I like it:

The script automates the repetitive task of adding UTM parameters to all campaigns, saving you time and effort. It applies a consistent structure across campaigns, eliminating the risk of human error in manual tagging.

The script works across multiple campaign types, including standard Search, Display, Shopping, Performance Max, and (potentially in the future) Demand Gen.

It is straightforward to implement in your Google Ads account, requiring minimal setup. Once configured, it runs without needing ongoing manual intervention.

URL: https://adequate.digital/en/utms-for-google-ads-campaigns/

PRO TIP: Run the script daily to ensure that any newly created campaigns or changes to existing ones are consistently processed.

Happy scripting!

 

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