Knowledge base
Can I exclude placements in Performance Max?
Yes, at the account level: you can exclude specific YouTube channels/videos, mobile app categories, and content types, though not individual Display sites the way a standard Display campaign allows.
Yes, though the controls are account-level rather than campaign-by-campaign and coarser than a standard Display campaign's placement exclusions. Google Ads lets you exclude specific YouTube channels and videos, certain mobile app categories, and some content types (like content marked as sensitive) at the account level, and those exclusions apply across every Performance Max campaign in the account.
What you cannot do is exclude an individual underperforming Display website the way you could in a classic Display campaign, because Performance Max does not expose that level of placement detail. If a channel-level breakdown shows Display quietly underperforming with no way to exclude the specific culprit, that is a sign to move that share of budget into a campaign type that gives you finer control instead of trying to patch it inside Performance Max.