Last week, I shared a little tactic to quickly and easily exclude all mobile apps from your PMax campaigns. You can find the details here: https://nilsrooijmans.com/excluding-all-mobile-app-placements-the-quicker-and-easier-way/
A long-time member of the list, Hana Kobzová (name shared with permission), sent a question that was asked often on LinkedIn and Reddit:
“Why do you recommend adding all those values from your list? Doesn’t ‘mobileappcategory::69500’ already cover everything?”
Great question! I also use ‘mobileappcategory::69500’ a lot for Display campaigns. It’s a quick way to easily add all mobile app categories to the placement exclusions in Display.
However, here’s the thing: Performance Max campaigns DO NOT have the option to exclude placement at the campaign level.
To exclude placements from PMax, you need to add the exclusion at the account level.
Also, the little trick of entering ‘mobileappcategory::69500’ in your placement exclusions does not work at the account level. Currently, the Google Ads UI throws this message when you try to save the exclusion: “An error occurred. Please try again or check your targeting options.”
So, as far as I know, copy-pasting all the Mobile App Placement Exclusions from this list and adding them at the account level is the quickest way to exclude all mobile apps from your PMax campaigns.
– Nils
PS: Want to always be in the know when Performance Max campaigns are showing your ads on bad placements? Check out my Google Ads Script for PMax Placement Exclusions.