Brand Exclusions (PMax)

What Are Brand Exclusions in PMax?

If your PMax campaign shows an 800 percent ROAS but 60 percent of that comes from brand traffic, the true acquisition performance looks very different. Exclude your own brand from PMax and control brand traffic through a dedicated search campaign — that way you have full control over brand bids and see the real value your PMax campaign delivers for new customer acquisition.

Brand Exclusions in Performance Max let you exclude specific branded terms from showing up in your PMax campaigns. This is especially important for separating brand traffic from generic traffic and preventing PMax from inflating performance through cheap brand clicks that would have converted anyway, even without an ad.

The feature works against Google’s brand database. You select brands from a list, and Google prevents PMax from showing ads for search queries containing those brand terms. Beyond your own brand name, you can also exclude competitor brands if you don’t want PMax used for competitor targeting. The exclusions apply to the search component of PMax, not to Display or YouTube.

In practice, separating brand and non-brand traffic is fundamental for honest performance evaluation. If your PMax campaign shows an 800 percent ROAS but 60 percent is brand traffic, the non-brand performance looks very different. Exclude your own brand from PMax and control brand traffic through a dedicated search campaign. This gives you full control over brand bids and reveals the true acquisition performance of your PMax campaign in Channel-Level Reporting.