If you only make one structural change to your Performance Max campaigns this quarter, make it your brand exclusion lists. Done well, they protect your dedicated brand Search campaign from cannibalization, cap wasted spend on competitor brand queries, and free your PMax campaign to spend on the non-brand intent it was built to find. Done poorly — or not done at all — they're a recurring 10–30% drag on your account's effective non-brand performance.
This is the brand exclusion list pattern we use across the ecommerce accounts running through our Performance Max management practice.
Why do brand exclusions matter so much in PMax?
PMax runs Google's full query expansion engine. That engine is incentivized to spend your budget on whatever it predicts will convert — and brand queries always predict well, because brand intent converts at 3–10× the rate of non-brand intent for most ecommerce categories.
The result, unmanaged, is that PMax will:
- Eat your own brand searches at PMax CPCs.
- Claim the conversion credit those branded searches would have earned in your brand Search campaign.
- Make your brand Search campaign look underperforming relative to PMax.
- Cause you to over-fund PMax and starve the channel that's actually doing the work.
A clean brand exclusion list breaks this loop.
What's the difference between account-level and campaign-level brand exclusions?
Two distinct controls, both useful, easy to confuse:
- Account-level negative brand list: Applies to every Search and PMax campaign in the account. Use this for your own brand and any brand you never want to pay for (e.g., trademarked terms a partner has licensed exclusively).
- Campaign-level brand exclusion list: Applies only to the PMax campaign it's attached to. Use this for competitor brands you want excluded from PMax specifically — possibly because you bid on those terms in a separate, dedicated competitor Search campaign with tighter creative control.
The mental model: account-level for terms you never want to spend on anywhere, campaign-level for terms you want spent on through a different campaign type.
How do I build the initial brand exclusion list?
A four-step build that fits in a single afternoon:
1. Your own brand (always, no exceptions)
- Brand name, every spelling variant, common misspellings.
- Brand + product line ("[brand] sneakers," "[brand] coffee maker").
- Brand + reseller terms ("[brand] amazon," "[brand] outlet," "[brand] discount").
- Brand + support terms ("[brand] returns," "[brand] login," "[brand] customer service").
Add all of these to an account-level negative brand list. Re-attach to every Search and PMax campaign.
2. Top 10 direct competitors
Pull from your competitive landscape doc — the same one your SEO team uses. For each competitor:
- Primary brand name.
- Common misspellings (Google catches most of these but not all).
- Hyphenation variants.
Add these to a campaign-level brand exclusion list on your PMax campaigns. Leave them eligible in any dedicated competitor Search campaign you run.
3. Adjacent brands you sell for but don't want PMax bidding on
If you're a multi-brand retailer (your store sells Adidas, Nike, New Balance, and a dozen others), this is the tricky case. You probably want PMax to spend on these terms — that's a chunk of your transactable intent. But you may want a dedicated brand-PLA campaign for your top three suppliers, with stricter ROAS targets and cleaner creative.
In that case, add those top three to the campaign-level brand exclusion list on the PMax campaign so PMax cedes that traffic to the dedicated brand campaign.
4. Adversarial / contested brands
If you've had legal correspondence about a trademarked term, add it to the account-level negative brand list. Belt-and-suspenders.
How often should I update the list?
Bi-weekly, minimum. New competitors show up faster than you'd expect — funded DTC brands launch all year, and Google's query expansion finds them within days.
The workflow:
- Pull the brand query report from the PMax Insights tab.
- Sort by spend, descending.
- For any new brand entry above a meaningful spend threshold, decide: keep, exclude, or migrate to a separate campaign.
- Update the appropriate exclusion list. Document the change in your account log.
The brand query report is the single most useful PMax surface for ongoing optimization. Make checking it a recurring task.
What about non-brand competitor terms that look like brand terms?
The annoying case. "Best running shoes" is non-brand. "Allbirds running shoes" is brand. "Cloud running shoes" is — well, that depends on whether you mean On Cloud the brand or "cloud" as a feature descriptor.
For these borderline cases:
- If the term is in your category but ambiguous, leave it eligible and monitor the search terms report.
- If you find PMax spending on a borderline term that's actually competitor-brand intent, add the specific phrasing as an exclusion. PMax brand exclusion lists accept multi-word entries.
- Document the decision. A future operator will look at the list and wonder why "cloud running shoes" is excluded.
Does this apply to Microsoft Advertising PMax too?
Yes, with the same logic, though the in-platform surface is slightly different. Microsoft's PMax equivalent (Performance Max in Microsoft Advertising) supports brand exclusions similarly, and the rationale is identical — protect your brand Search campaign on Bing from being cannibalized by PMax on Bing. Accounts running through our Microsoft Ads management practice get the same exclusion structure applied to both platforms.
What about LinkedIn and Meta?
Brand exclusion in the PMax sense doesn't apply on LinkedIn or Meta — those platforms are interest- and audience-targeted, not query-targeted. But the analogous discipline does apply: in LinkedIn advertising, you exclude your own customer Matched Audience from prospecting campaigns; in Facebook advertising, you exclude purchasers from prospecting audiences and exclude prospecting audiences from retargeting. Different mechanic, same principle: don't let one campaign cannibalize another.
Key takeaways
- Brand exclusions in PMax are the highest-leverage structural change most accounts haven't made.
- Account-level negative brand list for your own brand. Campaign-level brand exclusion lists for competitor brands.
- Pull the PMax brand query report bi-weekly. Update the lists. Document.
- The same logic — protect specialized campaigns from generalist cannibalization — applies across Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, and Meta with platform-appropriate mechanics.
Want this set up cleanly on your account?
The first build is an afternoon. The maintenance is bi-weekly. The accounts that don't do this leak budget every day. If you'd rather have the 1Digital® PPC services team build and maintain it for you — including the ongoing brand query review — tell us about your account and we'll start with a free audit.