Audit your exclusion lists before Display campaigns migrate

Export your exclusion lists before you touch the Display migration tool, which opened in June 2026. Exclusions are the settings most likely to loosen in transit, and a missing exclusion goes unnoticed until an ad appears somewhere it should not.

This is a boring piece of admin that protects a brand worth far more than the media spend, so it gets treated with the seriousness of a data migration rather than a settings change.

The exclusions that matter, in order of risk

Mobile app inventory. This is where the waste lives, and it always has. Accidental taps in free games generate clicks that look like traffic and convert like noise. If your account has never excluded app categories broadly, run the placement report filtered to apps before migrating and see what you have been buying.

Placement exclusion lists. Site, app and channel level. These are usually the longest lists in the account, built over years, and the most tedious to rebuild from memory. Which is exactly why they need to exist somewhere other than inside the campaign.

Content suitability and inventory type. Expanded, standard or limited. This setting reads as a slider and functions as a policy. Record what each campaign is currently on, because defaults are not always what you had.

Digital content labels. Audience-rating exclusions. Small setting, large consequence for regulated and family-sensitive brands.

Topic and keyword exclusions. Content-based rather than placement-based, and easy to lose because they sit in a different part of the interface to placement lists.

Negative audience lists. Existing customers, recent converters, employees. Also easy to lose, and if the migration drops them you start paying to retarget people who already bought.

The migration procedure

Six steps, in this order.

1. 1.Export everything from Google Ads Editor. Campaign settings, all exclusion lists, all shared library content. Save it with a date in the filename and put it somewhere other than your desktop.
2. 2.Screenshot the settings pages that Editor does not export cleanly, particularly content suitability and digital content labels.
3. 3.Move your placement exclusions to the account level. Account-level placement exclusions have been available since January 2026 and they persist across campaigns, which is the entire point. Campaign-level lists are what get lost.
4. 4.Migrate one campaign. Not the account. One, ideally a mid-value one with clear reporting.
5. 5.Diff it. Compare every exclusion, setting and target on the migrated campaign against your export. Do not eyeball it, work through the list.
6. 6.Then migrate the rest in batches, re-running the diff on each batch.

The diff step is the one people skip, and it is the only step that catches a silent loss.

What to check in the first fortnight after

Placement report, filtered to apps, sorted by spend. If app placements have appeared that were not there before, an exclusion did not survive.

Impression distribution by inventory type. A sudden widening usually means the content suitability setting reset to a broader default.

Reach against your suppression lists. Run a check on whether existing customers are seeing prospecting ads. This is the exclusion nobody tests and the one that generates the most awkward internal email.

Cost per click direction. A meaningful drop in average CPC after migration is not usually good news on Display. It generally means you are reaching cheaper, lower-quality inventory that an exclusion used to block.

The reporting discontinuity

Expect metrics to move for structural reasons rather than performance reasons. Campaign types group placements differently, and a number that looks like a performance change can be a definition change.

Note the migration date on every dashboard and every report that touches Display. One line in the notes field saves an hour of confused analysis three months from now, when someone asks why the trend broke in July and nobody remembers.

The underlying lesson

Exclusion lists are institutional memory. Each entry represents somebody, at some point, finding something bad and stopping it. When the list is destroyed the knowledge goes with it, because the reason was never written down anywhere.

The durable fix is not just to migrate carefully. It is to maintain the list at account level with a dated note against each addition explaining why it is there. Then the next migration, the next agency handover and the next platform change do not each cost you the same lesson again.

Do the export today and the migration whenever you like, because the export is the part that expires.