The Google Display Network reaches something like two million sites and apps. That scale is the pitch — and it’s also the leak. Left on its defaults, a Display campaign will happily spend a chunk of your budget inside mobile games and low-quality apps, where most of the “clicks” are fat-thumb accidents on a banner someone was trying to dismiss. Those clicks cost you the same as a real one. They just never convert.
Unlike Performance Max, Display lets you see exactly where your money went — and exclude the places it’s wasted. Most accounts never look, because the report is one menu deeper than the numbers people check daily. Here’s the two-minute version.
Pull the placement report
Open the Display campaign → in the left menu find Content(older accounts: Placements → Where ads showed) → switch the view to placements, add the Conversions and Costcolumns, and set the last 30 days. You’ll get a list of the actual apps and sites that ran your ad. Sort by cost, descending. The pattern jumps out fast: a handful of mobileapp:: placements — often games — with real spend and a conversions column reading 0.
What share of spend is going to mobile apps?
Campaign → Content → placements, add Cost + Conversions
App placements (they start
mobileapp::) are where accidental-tap traffic concentrates. Compare their share of cost to their share of conversions.Which specific placements spend with zero conversions?
Sort by cost. A site or app that has spent real money and converted no one is an exclusion, not reach — it’s buying you clicks that never land.
Is the campaign opted into every placement type?
Campaign settings → additional settings
If you don’t need in-app inventory at all, excluding the whole mobile-app category in one move is blunt but effective.
Are the surviving placements actually relevant?
Beyond zero-conversion ones, scan for sites that have nothing to do with your product. Relevance is the other half of a clean Display placement list.
0 of 4 checked
Exclude, don’t just note
For each placement that spends and never converts, add it as a placement exclusionon the campaign (or the ad group). The budget it was eating doesn’t vanish — it redistributes to the placements that do convert. If in-app traffic as a whole is dead weight for your product, exclude the mobile-app category and be done with it. Re-check the report a couple of weeks later, because the network’s long tail refills: new junk placements surface as the old ones drop off.
None of this needs a tool. It needs someone to open the report on a schedule and act on the lines that spend and never return — which is exactly the kind of thing that quietly never happens.
Admiral runs this check on a connected Display account on every sync — it flags the placements that spend and never convert, priced from your own history, and offers to exclude a website or app placement in one click, recorded and undoable. Same “find the leak, approve the fix” audit that runs on Search, Demand Gen, Performance Max, Video, Shopping and Meta.
Run the free audit