What Are Mobile App Exclusions?

When it comes to PPC, it is essential that your campaigns are optimised and your budget isn't being wasted. There are a number of different campaign types available within Google Ads and they all have their own unique settings that you can adjust.

Search campaigns allow you to reach customers interested in your product or service with text ads, shopping campaigns allow you to promote your products with shopping ads and so forth. There are a couple more campaign types that you can use, but the point here is that they all allow you to determine where your customers see your ads.

Lets talk about the Display Campaign type. The Display Campaign type allows you to create visually appealing ads that are served across Googles Display Network, on Youtube, and on Mobile or in an App. The reach of this type of campaign is absolutely mind blowing, think about how many apps there are and how many times you have seen an ad within an app? quite a few I bet.

Here are some quick numbers, there are currently more than 2.5 million apps on the Apple App Store & 2.9 million on the Google Play Store.

Surely this is a good thing right, more reach more customers? Not necessarily, your ads may be delivered on apps that are not relevant. For example, a kid playing a game of angry birds won't be interested in your ad about Law Services but they still might click, which in return you have just paid for. What a waste of money that is.

Kids aren't just to blame though, i'm sure you have opened an app before and accidentally clicked on an ad. Then you've quit the app, reopened it and you hit the ad again. Thats twice in a row. This is where those costs start to add up for the advertiser.

In the screenshot below, you can see a few examples of where ads can be shown by using the Display campaign type.

If a Law Firm was using the Display campaign type to advertise their services, they really wouldn't want to be serving ads to mobile app categories on the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or even the Microsoft App Store. It would be a waste of money and clicks as these categories are likely to not be relevant at all. This can be catastrophic to a campaign if the CPC is very high.

The problem here is that most Google Ads users do not know that you can exclude these categories from the Display campaign and this will prevent unnecessary budget wastage.

To exclude mobile apps from your Display campaign just go to your campaign and hit placements --> exclusions --> exclude placements.

In the screenshot below you can see that the apps are broken down by categories.

This is where the next problem lies. There are 141 app categories within different app stores and you have to manually click every category to exclude them from the Display campaign. Not only is this time consuming but you don't actually know what apps are costing you money without going back and forth between the 'where ads showed' & the 'exclusions' tab.

There may also be a number of apps that are actually generating conversions from mobile apps so you wouldn't want to exclude them. Once again this is a time consuming task.

It is almost like you need an automated tool to do it for you.

At Click Guardian we have now rolled out the Mobile App Exclusions feature. You can now block unwanted Mobile App categories from your Google Ads Display campaigns with ease.

Not only can you block categories in one click but you can also see how many clicks you have received from apps, how much it has cost you and the number of conversions you have got from apps.

Prevent budget wastage in your Google Ads campaigns with Click Guardian. Start your free 7 day trial now!