Performance Max works like this: you hand Google your budget and it spreads it across every channel at once — Search, Shopping, Display, video, Gmail, Discover and mobile apps. Sounds convenient. In practice it is apps and Display that most often burn the money for nothing, and in the report it all looks like cheap traffic.
Why apps and Display are the problem
Clicks inside mobile games cost pennies, and there are plenty of them. Someone fat-fingers a banner between levels, lands on your site, closes it a second later. In the report that is a counted click at a low price, and the automation cheerfully sends more budget there. Purchases from that traffic are usually zero.
Display is the same story: impressions land on random sites, leads come from news portals and placements that have nothing to do with your product. The average cost per click looks pretty, conversions don’t come.
The trouble is that PMax barely shows you this breakdown. You see the overall result, not the fact that a third of the budget went to a farming game.
What you can actually turn off
Honest answer first: there is no “turn off Display” or “turn off apps” switch in the PMax interface. Google doesn’t give you one. But there are levers that visibly cut the junkiest traffic, and they work at the account level, which means they reach PMax too.
Exclude all mobile apps at once. This is the strongest lever. In account-level placement exclusions you add the special code mobileappcategory::69500. That excludes the entire app category, and it applies to both Display and Performance Max. Set it once and the whole app stream is cut off.
Excluded placements list. In the same account-level list you can upload specific apps, sites, channels and categories you don’t want to see. This is the surgical cleanup, for when a blanket ban is more than you need.
Account-level negative keywords. PMax now supports negative keywords set for the whole account. If you don’t see them in the dashboard, Google support enables them on request. They cut out irrelevant search queries and brand terms you don’t want to pay for.
Brand exclusions and URL expansion. Turn off final URL expansion or limit it to your own pages, so PMax doesn’t send people off wherever it likes. Brand exclusion lists help remove competitor and your own brand traffic where you don’t need it.
What you can’t do
You cannot leave Search alone inside PMax. You cannot split the campaign by channel and pay for each separately. Sometimes a Google rep will disable part of the channels on their side on request, but that is not self-serve and not guaranteed. So “squeeze out the most control” here means cutting off apps and the worst placements, not building the campaign brick by brick.
How to set it up
- Go to Tools, the content and placements section, and open account-level excluded placements.
- Add
mobileappcategory::69500. That cuts off all apps at once. - Add specific placements and categories to the same list if you have anything to exclude surgically.
- Check whether account-level negative keywords are available. If not, ask support to enable them.
- In the campaign settings, turn off final URL expansion or limit it to your own pages.
- A week or so later, look at how cost per lead and the share of junk clicks have changed.
When it is more honest to leave PMax
If you need control at the level of “I see every query and every placement,” then even after all the cleanup PMax stays a black box. For retail projects it is wiser in that case to move back to Standard Shopping, where you run the campaign by hand. We covered the migration in detail in a separate article.
If you’d rather not dig into it yourself, we can audit the account, cut the junk and show you where the budget actually goes.