Module 7 - Why you should avoid Enable Audience Expansion

Ticking "audience expansion" can cause real problems if you are relying on your exclusion lists, and in particular your app store exclusion. Simon says to be careful where your ads go into the app store, because it is littered with placements that are not necessarily correct: apps sitting in categories that do not really matter to your campaign. Google does not seem to have as much control over the app store as you would expect, and because the app store has so many impressions available, it can start pulling your budget over there when you do not want it to.

If you have built an exclusion list that excludes the app store globally, and you then go to build an audience, say targeting business professionals, there is a tempting little button at the bottom that says "audience expansion", worded as "reach more people who are similar to your selected audiences". You would presume, and Simon presumed too, and made this mistake himself, that ticking that box would not override an app store exclusion you had already put in place. He is here to say: watch out, because the minute you tick "reach more people similar to your selected audiences", it overrides your placement exclusion list, and it is carte blanche for Google to serve your ads pretty much wherever it wants. His advice is not to choose audience expansion if you want to keep particular placements excluded, you might want to test it yourself, but he has seen it happen, raised it with Google support over the following couple of weeks, and as far as he had found, it was still going into the app store when you did not want it to.