The case for Performance Max brand exclusions starts with a familiar complaint: the campaign reports an excellent return, and total revenue has not moved. Somebody concludes the campaign type is a scam.
It is not a scam, and it is not a black box either. It is a campaign that will happily spend your budget on the cheapest conversions available, and the cheapest conversions available are the people who were already looking for you.
What it absorbs if you let it
- Branded search. People typing your company name. They would mostly have arrived anyway.
- Existing customers. Repeat buyers who need no persuading.
- Remarketing. Visitors already deep in consideration.
All three convert cheaply. All three make the report look superb. None of them are growth.
Performance Max brand exclusions come first
Add your brand terms and common misspellings as brand exclusions. This is the single highest-impact change available in most PMax accounts, and it takes ten minutes.
Expect the reported return to fall afterwards. That is the campaign starting to report on what it is actually doing. If it falls to something unacceptable, you have learned that it was never doing much besides harvesting.
A campaign whose numbers collapse when you exclude your own brand name was not finding customers. It was collecting them.
Asset groups are the structure
Most PMax accounts run one asset group doing the work of five. Asset groups are how you control what shows to whom — by product category, by margin tier, by audience intent. One group means one undifferentiated blend.
Split by something that genuinely differs in economics. For retail that is usually product category or margin band, not a tidy alphabetical arrangement.
Audience signals are suggestions, not targeting
Worth getting right, and worth understanding: a signal tells the system where to start, it does not constrain where it goes. Customer lists, high-intent custom segments and your best-converting audiences all help it begin in sensible territory.
What they do not do is keep it there. If you need genuine control, a standard search campaign still does things PMax cannot.
The feed is the campaign
For retail, this is where most of the available performance sits. Titles written for how people search rather than for your storefront. Product types filled in. Custom labels separating high-margin from low, bestsellers from long tail, in-stock from nearly gone.
Without custom labels, PMax will spend happily on the item with the best conversion rate and the worst margin, and report it as a success.
Report it honestly
Split branded from non-branded in whatever you send to stakeholders. Then check it against total business revenue. If PMax revenue is rising and total revenue is flat, the campaign is redistributing credit rather than creating demand.
The blended ROAS and MER calculator makes that comparison in one screen, and it is worth running monthly rather than when somebody gets suspicious.
The useful test
Pause PMax for two weeks and watch total revenue, not PMax revenue. If total holds, the campaign was harvesting. If it falls, it was working. It is a blunt experiment and it answers the question definitively, which no amount of attribution modelling will.
More on how we run Google accounts on the Google Ads page.
Questions people ask
What are Performance Max brand exclusions?
A setting that stops the campaign serving against your own brand terms. Without it, Performance Max absorbs branded search — demand you already had — and reports it as campaign-driven revenue, which is why the return looks excellent while the business does not grow.
How do I add brand exclusions?
Through a brand list on the campaign. It has historically needed to be requested or enabled rather than simply toggled, so if you cannot find it, ask your Google representative rather than assuming it does not exist.
How do I know if PMax is cannibalising brand?
Compare branded search impressions and clicks before and after the campaign launched. If branded search volume fell while Performance Max revenue rose by a similar amount, the money moved rather than the business.
Does Performance Max work without exclusions?
It can, for a business with no brand demand to absorb. For anyone with existing recognition, leaving it on defaults produces a flattering report and a disappointing bank balance.