Part of your display budget is funding mobile game apps
On the display network you do not buy placements, you buy an audience and the platform puts the ad where it wants. In B2B, a measurable share of the budget ends up in mobile apps, in clicks that were never intentional.
The mechanism is not fraudulent. A banner sits at the bottom of a free app's screen, a finger touches it while aiming for something else, the click is billed. The visitor lands on your page, does not understand, leaves in two seconds. Your reports record a visit and a bounce.
What makes the problem durable is that it does not look like a problem. The cost per click is low, which improves your averages. The volume is high, which fills the dashboards. A display campaign can therefore show excellent surface metrics while producing no enquiries at all.
One simple sign lets you spot it without opening the account. If a display campaign shows a high click rate and time on site near zero, that is not a landing page problem. It is the gap between a sliding finger and a person deciding.
In B2B, the effect is amplified. Your buyer is a narrow population, the platform struggles to find them, and it compensates with volume where inventory is plentiful and cheap. Which is exactly where your buyers are not.
The report nobody opens
Every platform publishes the list of sites and apps where your ads ran, with the spend attached. That report has always existed, it is three clicks away, and it is rarely consulted because it appears in no monthly reporting template.
Sort it by descending spend and read the top twenty lines. The exercise takes five minutes and it almost always produces an immediate exclusion list. The mobile app category can be removed with a single setting, which handles most of the case in B2B.
The two-minute check
- Open the placement report for your display campaigns and sort by spend.
- Calculate the share of budget consumed by placements you would never have bought on purpose.
If that share exceeds a tenth of the display budget, the exclusion is the most profitable move of your quarter. It costs nothing and it works the next day.
Going through that report with you and building the exclusion list is part of what we cover in a paid audit.
Do not exclude to the point of choking the campaign. An overlong list shrinks available inventory and pushes your costs up. Remove what spends without producing, and let the rest breathe.
This channel is compared to the others in choosing and concentrating advertising budgets.
The asymmetry between what widens on its own and what has to be excluded by hand is explained in the real lever is exclusion, and reading returns in the move from reported ROAS to actual profit.
- Google Ads, documentation on the placement report and placement exclusions, help centre, accessed January 2027.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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