“Nobody knows — this is the other reason why people don't like this. You have really limited visibility into where your ads are showing. If you have a really good Google rep they do have the ability to see the breakout but in the frontend you're making a lot of assumptions and you're a little bit blind to what's actually at play.”

Limited placement visibility makes UAC optimization inference-heavy — get a rep with backend access

In the Google Ads UI, placements are bucketed into just four groups — Search, Search Partners, YouTube, and Display Network — each hiding sub-placements. Play Store search and google.com search are lumped together; AdMob and Play Browse are both inside Display Network. Without a Google rep who has backend access, advertisers are largely blind to whether poor performance comes from low-intent AdMob traffic or high-quality Play Store search. Ashley Black's advice: build a relationship with a dedicated Google rep who can pull the placement breakdown and treat the algorithm as an optimization partner rather than an adversary.