15% of impressions in mobile apps.
Games, wallpaper apps and video-maker apps. Nobody researching a workstation is in a wallpaper app, and nobody in a wallpaper app means to click an ad.
UNIBRIGHT SOLUTIONS · AI PPC · CASE STUDY
How We Cut PMax Ad Waste From 15% to 1%
Performance Max is the campaign type Google pushes hardest, and the one advertisers understand least. You give it a budget, some assets and a goal, and it spends across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and mobile apps on your behalf.
1%JUNK APP SHARE
88%GOOGLE REACH
$19COST PER LEAD
25PMAX LEADS
01 / THE PROBLEM
The Problem
Performance Max is the campaign type Google pushes hardest, and the one advertisers understand least. You give it a budget, some assets and a goal, and it spends across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and mobile apps on your behalf.
That last one is where the money goes quietly missing. Mobile app inventory includes games, wallpaper apps and video editors, where a large share of clicks are accidental — a thumb catching a banner mid-game. Those clicks cost the same as a click from someone searching for your product.
On this account, 15% of impressions were landing in app inventory. Google reports it, but the placement report is buried deep enough that most advertisers never open it. The campaign looked like it was working. Nobody had checked where it was actually showing.
REVIEW
What Our Review Found
Only 77% on Google’s own surfaces.
Search, Shopping and YouTube are where the buying intent is. Nearly a quarter of the campaign was showing somewhere else.
Low-quality display sites taking a further share.
Content-farm and made-for-advertising sites, which exist to serve ads rather than readers.
No exclusion lists in place.
The campaign had been running on defaults. Defaults favour reach, and reach is not the same as customers.
Placement data never reviewed.
The report existed the whole time. It had simply never been opened, which is the normal state of most Performance Max accounts.
BUILT
What We Built
Pulled the placement report and read it properly.
Not a summary — the actual list of apps and sites the ads had appeared on. That is where the pattern becomes obvious.
Blocked the junk app categories.
Games, wallpaper and video-maker apps excluded outright. These will never contain a buyer for a technical product, whatever the targeting says.
Excluded low-quality websites.
Content farms and made-for-advertising sites removed from the delivery.
Rebuilt delivery toward Google’s own surfaces.
Where someone is searching, shopping or watching something relevant — the places where a click means something.
Put the review on a schedule.
New placements appear constantly. A one-off cleanup decays within weeks, so exclusions are now reviewed and extended every month.
05 RESULT
The Results
RESULTDETAIL
App impressions down from 15% to 1%Roughly 14 in every 100 impressions redirected away from accidental clicks
Google surfaces up from 77% to 88%Nearly 9 in 10 impressions now show where intent is highest
$19 cost per lead from Performance Max25 leads from about $483 of spend
5,201 clicksFrom 64,127 impressions
Low-quality sites still at 9%, up from 6%Site cleanup is ongoing — a fresh exclusion list is being added
Review now runs monthlyNew placements appear constantly; a single cleanup does not hold
MEANS
What This Means
Nobody is watching the placements.
The data is in every Performance Max account and almost never looked at. Opening one report found 15% of impressions going somewhere no buyer has ever been.
Accidental clicks cost full price.
A thumb slipping in a mobile game bills exactly the same as someone searching for your product by name. The platform cannot tell the difference; you can.
Defaults are built for reach
Performance Max will happily spend everywhere unless told otherwise. That is not a fault in the product, it is what it was designed to do.
Cleanup does not stay clean.
New apps and sites appear constantly. Monthly review is the work; the first cleanup is just the start of it.
We are still finishing.
App placements are handled. Low-quality websites went the wrong way this month and the site exclusion list is still being built out.
FIX
What This Does Not Fix
Worth being straight about:
A weak offer.
Cleaner placements put your ad in front of better people. What they see when they arrive is a separate problem.
Poor creative.
Performance Max builds its own combinations from the assets you supply. Bad inputs produce bad ads on good placements.
Attribution.
Performance Max reports in aggregate. Cleaning placements does not make it tell you which part of the campaign produced the sale.
Everything.
This is one lever. It stops waste; it does not by itself create demand.
WORKS
Why This Works Elsewhere
Almost every Performance Max account has this problem, because the defaults create it and the report that reveals it is buried. If nobody on your account has opened the placement report in the last quarter, there is close to a guarantee that some of your budget is in app inventory right now.
It takes an hour to check and it is usually the cheapest improvement available to a paid account.
NEXT STEP
The Next Step
Give us read access to your Google Ads account. We will pull your placement report and show you exactly which apps and sites your budget reached last month, and what share of it was never going to produce a customer.
Services Provided:
Google Ads management, Performance Max optimisation, placement auditing and exclusion strategy, campaign structure, conversion tracking, monthly reporting