Exclude Display Placements in Google Ads

A display placement is a specific website, app, or YouTube channel where your Google Display ads appear. Google's Display Network (GDN) encompasses millions of sites and apps across the internet. By default, Google automatically selects placements based on your targeting settings — but this means your ads can appear on low-quality or irrelevant sites that waste budget without driving results.

Inside your Display campaign, click Insights and reports in the left-hand navigation menu. Then select When and where ads showed, followed by Where ads showed. This opens the placement report showing every website and app where your ads have been served, along with performance data like impressions, clicks, cost, and conversions for each placement.

Start with placements that have high impressions, zero clicks, and zero conversions — these are consuming your budget with no engagement or return. A quick way to find them is to filter the placement report to show only rows with fewer than 1 conversion, then sort by impressions in descending order. Also look for apps (especially mobile games), parked domain pages, and irrelevant news sites as common sources of wasted spend.

Campaign-level exclusions apply only to the specific campaign you are editing. Account-level placement exclusions (found under Tools & Settings → Shared library → Placement exclusion lists) apply across all campaigns in your account. If you have placements that are universally irrelevant (e.g., children's apps, low-quality content sites), add them to a shared exclusion list so they are blocked automatically in every campaign.

For active Display campaigns, review placements at least once a month. New sites and apps are continuously added to the Display Network, so exclusions from last month may not cover everything appearing this month. If your campaign is running a large daily budget, weekly reviews are more appropriate to prevent significant wasted spend from accumulating.

Excluding poor placements typically improves your campaign's effective reach by redirecting budget to sites that actually convert. While your total impression count may decrease, your quality impressions — on relevant, high-converting placements — will increase as a share of spend. Think of placement exclusions as a way to raise the average quality of where your ads appear, not a way to reduce volume.