Have a feeling display placements are eating up your budget and killing your profitably on Performance Max? 💸

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You're not alone and you're not wrong.

Recently, we've conducted three audits, both lead-gen and e-commerce, that have led to the same conclusion... display placements can seriously drag down the performance of your pmax campaigns.

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Common Example:

pMax search / shopping are doing great & above target in most campaigns. Display campaigns are below target by a considerable margin and dragging down profitability. In one example, performance max took up 70% of the monthly budget, and display accounted for 40% of pmax spend. Display ROAS was at 0.5x, while search ROAS was at 3x.

We had a feeling this change would make a big impact.

To be clear, we’re not against display. In fact, some display placements were converting — so it wasn’t all bad.

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Solution:

1. Run the Mike Rhodes pmax script v52 (paid version) Under the advanced settings > placements tab, we saw all the performance of Display placements leading to inefficient spend. You can see conversions from each specific placement! Link in comments to get his script. Pay for it, it's worth it.

2. Remove costly placements from your campaignsIn Google Ads, navigate to Performance Max Campaign > Content > Placement > Exclusions. Add in all the costly, under-perfoming URLs from your report

3. Other tips:

Add things like placements exclusions list by Lunio. Tons of data have led them to find 100k+ placements that you should avoid.

Exclude all mobile apps. In my experience, most of them are junk and wasted spend. They can be easily excluded using the navigation above.

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In conculsion, don't let terrible display apps and sites drag down your performance. Exclusions can be a super powerful and easy way to improve performance.

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