If you run a store with real Google Ads spend, you have probably noticed PMax posting a suspiciously high ROAS while your total order count barely moves. That gap is the problem brand exclusions exist to fix. This guide walks the setup, then goes where the help docs stop — the dollars.
Why brand exclusions matter (the part most guides skip)
Branded searches convert at a fraction of non-brand cost because the intent is pre-built — the shopper already knows your name. PMax is built to find the cheapest conversions in the account, so it gravitates straight to those branded queries.
The result looks like a win and isn't. PMax "captures" orders that your organic listings, direct traffic, or a dedicated brand Search campaign were already getting for pennies.
Practitioner analyses put the apparent-ROAS inflation from absorbed brand traffic at roughly 15–30%, with about 8–15% of PMax budget leaking to brand queries in unprotected accounts (GrowthSpree; ClickTrends). Treat those as field estimates, not laws — but the direction is consistent.
The mechanism is blunt. As the agency smec puts it, you end up paying "$1.50 for a click that you could have bought for $0.20" (smec).
What the leak actually costs you — a worked example
Say your store runs 900 orders a month at a $38 AOV, with $6,000/month in Google Ads spend routed mostly through one PMax campaign reporting a 5.0x ROAS.
Now pull the PMax search-terms report and find that branded queries drove 400 clicks last month. Using smec's figures above, those 400 clicks cost roughly 400 × $1.50 = $600 inside PMax. The same shoppers, routed through a dedicated brand Search campaign at about $0.20 a click, would have cost 400 × $0.20 = $80.
That is $520 a month — about $6,240 a year — spent to buy traffic that was already yours. And because those cheap conversions were propping up the blended number, the 5.0x ROAS was never telling you the truth about your non-brand acquisition.
Here is the honesty check: ROAS is not profit. Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ contribution margin, so a store with a 40% margin needs 1 ÷ 0.40 = 2.5x just to cover variable costs. A PMax campaign showing 5.0x on absorbed brand traffic can still be losing money on every genuinely new customer it finds.
How to set up Performance Max brand exclusions
The controls have existed at the account level since 2024, and excluding a brand automatically pulls in its variations and misspellings (AdNabu; Astraloop). Here is the sequence.
1. Build a brand list
In Google Ads, go to the brand lists section (under the account-level settings for brands). Create a new list and add your own brand — Google matches variants and common misspellings for you, so you do not need to type every version.
Give the list a clear name. You will reuse it across campaigns, and future-you will want to know what it covers.
2. Apply the list to your PMax campaign
Open the campaign, then Settings → Additional settings → Brand exclusions. Select the brand list you built.
To do several campaigns at once, select them in the campaigns table, click Edit → Change brands, and apply the list in bulk.
3. Decide the Shopping checkbox
Brand exclusions apply to Search, Shopping, and YouTube search inventory. PMax gives you one extra lever the help docs bury: a checkbox to "allow Shopping ads on searches that mention excluded brands."
Leave it on if you still want your product listings to appear when someone searches your brand plus a product ("[your brand] hoodie") — Shopping ads there are usually worth keeping. Turn it off only if a separate campaign already owns that real estate.
4. Catch competitor and third-party terms too
Brand lists aren't just for your own name. You can exclude third-party brands you don't sell, or add competitor brands you don't want PMax wandering into. Keep that list short and deliberate.
Don't exclude without a catch net
Excluding brand from PMax without replacing it is how you lose the traffic entirely. The standard fix is a dedicated brand Search campaign running alongside, so your brand queries land somewhere cheap and controlled.
This isn't an either/or world anymore. PMax and Standard Shopping now compete on equal Ad Rank in the same account rather than PMax always winning (smec), and an Optmyzr study of 24,702 campaigns found 82% of advertisers run PMax alongside Shopping or Search (Optmyzr). The current best practice is portfolio construction, not replacement — a theme the Performance Max best practices for 2025 guide goes deeper on.
If you're still deciding where PMax fits against Standard Shopping in the first place, the Performance Max campaign type breakdown lays out which job each one does.
How to tell it's working
The classic "PMax is a black box" complaint is stale. Full search-terms reporting for PMax arrived in 2025, so you can now see the actual queries your campaign served on (The Media Image).
After you apply exclusions, watch three things over the next week or two. First, the PMax search-terms report — branded queries should thin out or disappear. Second, your brand Search campaign's impressions — they should rise to absorb the demand. Third, and most honestly, total business orders against total ad spend — if orders hold while PMax ROAS "drops," you were never losing sales, just losing a vanity number.
Where Victor fits
This is exactly the kind of grind-work a store owner never gets to. Victor is a senior AI employee who operates your Google Ads directly — he builds the brand exclusion list, applies it across your PMax campaigns, sets up the dedicated brand Search campaign, and reads the search-terms report to confirm the leak closed.
Because Victor also sees every order, every ad dollar, and every supplier cost from Printify, Printful, and Gelato together, he computes the true per-order profit behind each campaign — so he can tell you whether that reported PMax ROAS is real growth or recycled brand traffic. He manages the moves across Shopify, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and Klaviyo, and delivers the reconciled reports to your Google Drive.
Put Victor on your Google Ads and let him run the brand-exclusion cleanup for you.
For the full picture of how paid search math works against a live store, start with the Google Ads economics guide. And if you'd rather hand the whole channel to a specialist, here's how to think about a Google Shopping ads agency.
FAQs
What are brand exclusions in Performance Max?
They're an account-level list that stops your PMax campaign from serving on your own branded search queries, including misspellings and variants (AdNabu). The point is to keep PMax focused on finding new customers instead of billing you for shoppers who already know your name.
Will excluding my brand hurt total sales?
Not if you catch the demand elsewhere. Pair the exclusion with a dedicated brand Search campaign so those cheap, high-intent clicks still land — you're redirecting the traffic to a cheaper lane, not turning it off. The honest test is whether total business orders hold steady while the (previously inflated) PMax ROAS settles.
Should I keep the "allow Shopping ads on excluded brands" box checked?
Usually yes. Shopping listings on a branded product search ("[your brand] mug") tend to be worth showing. Turn it off only when another campaign already owns that placement and you want full separation.
How do I know how much brand traffic PMax is absorbing?
Open the PMax search-terms report, which has been available since 2025 (The Media Image). Segment branded versus non-brand queries — if a chunk of your conversions are branded, that's the cannibalization these exclusions fix.
Can I exclude competitor brands too?
Yes. Brand lists can hold third-party and competitor brands you don't want PMax serving on. Keep the list tight and intentional rather than dumping every rival name in.
Does PMax really favor my brand terms on its own?
Yes — it's designed to chase the cheapest conversions, and branded clicks are the cheapest in any account. Practitioner estimates put the leak at roughly 8–15% of PMax budget in unprotected accounts (ClickTrends). That's why "high PMax ROAS" means little until brand traffic is excluded or segmented.