If you’ve ever set up a display campaign in Google ads and glanced at the placement report after a few days, you’ll know how quickly mobile apps can eat up your budget. Over the years, Google has changed how you exclude apps from your targeting, seemingly making it more difficult each time.
There are a few different ways to exclude mobile apps from Google Ads display campaigns, one requires you to tediously tick every box for all of the various app categories. But I have a simple solution that can be done in 30 seconds:
Instructions
1. Click on your display campaign within the Google Ads dashboard
2. In the light grey menu, click on ‘Content’ and then click on ‘Exclusions’.
3. Click on the blue pencil icon and click ‘Edit ad group targeting’
4. Once the page loads, click on ‘Placements’ and then click on the pencil icon next to ‘Excluded placements’
5. On the tab where it says ‘Browse’, click the tab next to it labelled ‘Enter’
6. You then need to enter mobileappcategory::69500 and click ‘Add Placements’
7. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click save
And that’s it all done. Your display campaign will now have all mobile apps excluded. While you’re at it, I’d also suggest you check out an exclusion list created by Lunio (previously PPC Protect) which has 60,000+ low quality exclusions that you can use to exclude from your own campaign.
