Keywords & Targeting

Brand Exclusions

Brand exclusions are a Performance Max and Search campaign setting that prevents ads from serving on queries containing specified brand names, most commonly your own brand.

In practice

Left alone, Performance Max will happily bid on searches for your own brand name. Those clicks are cheap, they convert at a high rate, and they would mostly have converted through organic results or a dedicated brand campaign anyway. The result is a PMax campaign that reports a beautiful ROAS while contributing little incremental revenue.

Brand exclusions fix this. You add your brand (and any brands you sell but do not want PMax to compete on) to a brand list at the account level, then attach that list to the campaign. Google maintains the brand entities, so misspellings and variants are covered without you enumerating them. The same brand lists can be applied to broad match Search campaigns to keep them off competitor or partner brand terms.

We treat brand exclusions on every PMax campaign as mandatory, then run brand traffic through a separate Search campaign where it can be measured and bid on its own terms.

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Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.