Fellow member of the list, Arnoud Adam (name shared with permission), asked:
“Why would I want to exclude mobile app categories in Display?”
Short answer here: unless you love paying for fat-fingered clicks from Candy Crush kids, mystery placements, and apps that never convert, excluding app categories is your wallet’s best friend.
In-app advertising is notorious for irrelevant placements, fraudulent and accidental clicks, and poor engagement and conversion rates.
Don’t believe me? Read what the researchers have to say:
- “An Empirical Study of In-App Advertising Issues” https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.12112
- “Automated Ad Fraud Detection for Android Apps” https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01213
In my experience, excluding all mobile apps can cause a drop in impressions but often results in an improvement in conversion rate / ROAS, because many app placements were low quality or non-converting.
Here’s how to exclude all Mobile App Placements from all the campaigns (including PMax and Demand Gen) in your account:
https://nilsrooijmans.com/excluding-all-mobile-app-placements-the-quicker-and-easier-way/
BONUS TIP: When running PMax campaigns, be sure to run this script to check all your Placements (including Non-App placements like video, etc):
https://nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-script-pmax-placement-exclusion-suggestions/
– Nils
PS: I’m trying to help some more PPC friends by answering questions via an ‘Ask Me Anything’ each Wednesday.
If you’ve got a question to which my answer would benefit a larger part of the community, send it my way, and I’ll try to answer it 🙂