Your PMax ROAS Is a Lie: How to Fix It With Brand Exclusions

TL;DR

• Brand exclusions help you remove your own brand traffic from Performance Max campaigns, giving you a clearer view of true performance, not inflated numbers.
• Use them when you already have a dedicated branded Search campaign, want to measure non-brand growth, or need to avoid internal cannibalization between campaigns.
• Expect a short-term drop in ROAS and rise in CPA, that’s not failure, it’s clarity. You’re finally seeing what your prospecting spend is doing.
• Avoid using exclusions too early or without volume. Let PMax learn first, then separate brand from non-brand once you have stable data.
• In the long run, brand exclusions are a mark of PPC maturity. They demonstrate your focus on sustainable growth and data integrity, rather than inflated dashboards. Remember: Brand exclusions don’t make campaigns more profitable; they make them honest.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Your Performance Max campaign shows a 12x ROAS. Looks great in reports. But here’s the problem: half those conversions came from people who were already searching for your brand name. PMax didn’t create demand; it caught people who were already buying. This isn’t prospecting. It’s theft from your own branded Search campaign.

The result? Inflated metrics, wasted budget, and zero clarity on what’s actually driving new customer growth. Brand exclusions fix this by forcing PMax to do real work: find new customers instead of stealing credit for existing ones.

This is where brand exclusions come in. They give you the ability to carve out your own brand terms from PMax campaigns, creating cleaner data and a clearer picture of true incremental growth.

For agencies running large accounts, especially across Google and Meta, this distinction matters. Without exclusions, your reports blend intent-driven brand traffic with cold prospecting, leading to skewed insights and misallocated budgets. With them, you start to see the real performance of your non-brand marketing engine.

Brand exclusions aren’t about reducing reach, they’re about reclaiming clarity.

Collin Slattery, who’s agency does PPC for 8 and 9 figure brands worldwide, put it concisely in PPC Hero:  “We have found time and again that keeping branded terms live in PMax gives Google a license to waste your money.”

But it’s not as simple as deleting branded campaigns and hoping for the best. Here’s your playbook to gaining PMax clarity through brand exclusion. 

Understanding Brand Exclusions in Performance Max

Before deciding when to use brand exclusions, we have to know what they actually do, and what they don’t.

Brand exclusions let you stop your Performance Max campaigns from showing ads when someone searches for specific brand names. Think of it as telling PMax, “I only want to appear when people don’t already know me.”

Difference between brand exclusions and negative keywords: 

• Negative keywords block specific search terms at the account or campaign level.
  
• Brand exclusions, on the other hand, operate through a Brand List, a structured database that Google uses to identify and filter brand-related intent across Search and Shopping placements within PMax.

Even with exclusions, PMax and Search can occasionally enter the same auctions for mixed-intent queries, though brand exclusions reduce, not eliminate, overlap.When you apply a brand exclusion list, you’re heavily reducing the presence of branded terms in your campaigns, so if the brand absolutely does not want to show up for branded terms, adding them as negative keywords is a good idea. This is particularly useful if:

• You’re already running a dedicated branded Search campaign and want to avoid cannibalizing conversions.
  
• You want to isolate non-brand traffic to see how well PMax actually performs at generating new demand.
  
• You need to protect reporting accuracy for clients or internal teams that measure success separately for branded and non-branded efforts.

Brand exclusions are basically a control lever, not a trick. They don’t “improve” performance automatically; they simply help you see what’s really working when your brand name isn’t doing the heavy lifting.

Let’s take the following experiment by Haus.io as an example of what results can be gained with proper brand exclusions from PMax.

In this experiment, they tested the following: 

• A control group receiving no PMAX ads
• A treatment group receiving PMAX ads including brand terms
• A treatment group receiving PMAX ads excluding brand terms 

And based on this test, they concluded that:

Average Incremental Revenue: While the strategies were tied in terms of which one drove more total incremental revenue (50/50 win rate), excluding brand terms performed better on average, driving 24% more incremental revenue across all tests. This shows that when the exclusion strategy won, it did so by a significant margin.

New Customer Acquisition Efficiency: Excluding brand terms drove new customer acquisition more efficiently in 100% of the experiments that tracked this metric. This strategy resulted in an average of 40% lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for new customers, suggesting that including brand terms may disproportionately focus the algorithm on existing, high-intent customers, detracting from true prospecting efforts.

The AOV Factor: The optimal strategy is heavily dependent on the brand’s volume and Average Order Value (AOV). Brands with a high AOV found better success including brand terms, likely because they need the high-volume, high-value conversions from branded traffic to feed the PMax algorithm with sufficient data signals for effective learning.

Learn more about the experiment, here.

 

When Brand Exclusions Make Strategic Sense

Applying brand exclusions isn’t a default setting; it’s a deliberate tactical decision. For most mature accounts, that time comes sooner rather than later.

Here are the scenarios where implementing brand exclusions is a clear-cut win.

• You Already Run Dedicated Branded Search Campaigns

If you have a standard Search campaign built to capture users already typing your name into Google, letting Performance Max bid on those same terms creates an internal bidding war against yourself, driving up your own brand CPCs.

Worse, it destroys your ability to measure performance cleanly.  Performance Max campaigns can steal traffic and conversions from search, so technically it’s the same conversions you would have gotten from search if it had won the auction. This skews data and hides the truth. 

Excluding your brand in this case this forces a clear division of labour:

• Branded Search: Catches all high-intent, bottom-of-funnel traffic from people who know you.
• Performance Max: Is forced to do its actual job, finding new customers.
  

• You Want to Scale Effectively 

Without brand exclusions, you can’t make smart scaling decisions. If your PMax shows a 10x ROAS but 60% of that comes from branded searches, you’re about to pour budget into the wrong channel. You’ll scale a campaign that’s riding on brand equity, not creating new demand.

Exclusions reveal the real cost of acquiring a cold customer. That number, not your blended ROAS, determines whether you can profitably scale prospecting or whether your funnel needs fixing first. Clean data drives better budget calls.

 

• You Need Attribution That Aligns with Your Funnel

Marketing funnels have stages for a reason. You prospect for awareness, nurture for consideration, and capture for conversion. By default, PMax combines all these stages together into a single, confusing report. You can’t tell if a conversion came from a top-of-funnel YouTube placement or a bottom-of-funnel Shopping ad triggered by your brand name.

• Your Search Term Insights Report Is Chaotic

If you look at your PMax search term insights and see a chaotic mix of your own brand terms, competitor brand names, and generic queries, you have no actionable data. You can’t tell what’s working because the performance of high-intent brand searches is contaminating the results from everything else.

When to Avoid or Delay Brand Exclusions

For all their benefits, brand exclusions are not a day-one, every-account solution. Applying them prematurely can starve your campaigns of crucial data and actively harm performance. It’s a move for accounts with a certain level of maturity.

Holding off isn’t a sign of a lazy strategy. It’s a sign of a patient one. Here are the situations where you should probably not apply Brand Exclusions.

• If You Lack Full Branded Coverage

Excluding your brand from Performance Max assumes you have another campaign ready to catch that traffic. If you don’t have a dedicated, always-on Branded Search campaign with enough budget to dominate the top of the page, then creating an exclusion is like closing your front door without locking it. You’re effectively telling Google, “Don’t show my PMax ads when someone searches for me,” leaving the field wide open for competitors to pick off your customers.

Before you even consider this, ensure your standard Branded Search campaign is fully funded and capturing at least a 95% search impression share. Anything less, and you’re leaking high-intent traffic.

• If Your PMax Campaign Needs Brand Conversions to Learn

Algorithms are hungry for data, especially in the beginning. When you first launch a PMax campaign, it needs a steady diet of conversion signals to learn who your customers are and how to find more of them. Branded conversions, which are typically frequent, cheap, and predictable, are the perfect fuel for this initial learning phase.

Ripping them out too early can destabilize the campaign, prolonging the learning period and preventing it from ever finding its footing. Let PMax run with blended data for at least a few weeks until it has a solid 30-50 conversions under its belt. Once it’s stable, you can introduce exclusions to shift its focus from learning to prospecting.

Note: Before bringing in PMax to your Google Ads strategy, make sure your existing campaigns have been running for some amount of time and also have 30-50 conversions at least.

• When You’re a New Brand or in a Low-Volume Market

If your company is new or operates in a highly niche B2B space, your total brand search volume might be a trickle, not a flood. In these low-data environments, splitting your already scarce traffic between a Branded Search campaign and a non-brand PMax campaign is a recipe for failure.

Both campaigns will likely struggle with too few signals to optimize effectively. For small accounts, it can sometimes make more sense to consolidate everything into PMax or Search. The algorithm needs every click and conversion it can get, regardless of its source, to function properly. Don’t apply big-brand segmentation strategies to a small-brand data set.

 

How to Apply Brand Exclusions: Two Methods

You can either build a new campaign with exclusions from the start or add them to an existing one. Here’s the step-by-step for both as directed by Google.

Method 1: Create a New Performance Max Campaign with Exclusions

This is the cleanest approach for a new launch when you already know you need to separate brand and non-brand traffic from day one.

1. Start Your Build: In your Google Ads account, click the blue Create button and select Campaign.

   

   2. Choose Performance Max: Proceed through the campaign setup (objective, bidding) and select Performance Max as your campaign type.

   

   3. Look into Campaign Settings: When you reach the “Campaign Settings” page, scroll down and click to expand the More settings section.

4. Open Brand Exclusions: Within these options, click on Brand exclusions.

5. Apply Your Brand List: Click the text box to see your existing brand lists and select the one you want to apply. Note: If you don’t have a list yet, you can click + New brand list to create one on the fly. Just remember to be thorough and include misspellings and variations.

6. Handle the Shopping Ad Setting: When you apply brand exclusions in Performance Max, you’ll see an option that says “Allow Shopping ads on searches that mention excluded brands.” This is an important caveat. Even if you’ve excluded certain brands, ticking this box allows your Shopping ads to potentially appear on brand-related queries, meaning your ads may still show for those searches. 

If your goal is to focus on prospecting new customers who aren’t already actively searching for specific brands, it’s best to leave this box unchecked.

Also note: In Performance Max, you can choose whether brand exclusions apply to both Shopping and Search inventory or to Search inventory only. Make sure this aligns with your campaign’s intent before launching, especially if you want clean separation between branded and non-branded traffic.

7. Finish and Launch: Complete the remaining campaign creation steps (assets, budget, etc.) and launch your campaign.

Method 2: Add Brand Exclusions to an Existing Performance Max Campaign

Use this method for a campaign that’s already running. It’s the perfect way to refine a campaign’s focus after it has completed its initial learning phase.

1. Navigate to Your Campaigns: In the main Google Ads menu, click the Campaigns icon.
2. Select Your Campaign: Find and click on the name of the Performance Max campaign you want to edit.
3. Go to the Settings Tab: Once inside the campaign, click on the Campaign Settings tab in the secondary navigation menu.

4. Open Brand Exclusions: Click Brand exclusions to expand the section.

5. Apply Your Brand List: Click the text box, and from the dropdown, select the brand list you want to use.

6. Review the Shopping Ad Setting: The “Allow Shopping ads…” checkbox will be here as well. Double-check that it is unchecked if your goal is to fully wall off your brand traffic from this campaign.

7. Save Your Changes: Click the blue Save button to apply the exclusions to your live campaign.

Analyzing the Impact of Brand Exclusions in Performance Max

Once you’ve applied brand exclusions in Performance Max, the real work begins, interpreting what happens next. Too many advertisers expect clean data overnight or panic when metrics swing. In reality, the shift is less about immediate performance and more about revealing what’s actually been driving your results.

The First 30 Days: Expect the Drop

If you’ve excluded your brand terms from PMax, brace yourself: ROAS will likely fall, CPA will rise, and conversions will dip. That’s normal.

You’ve removed the easy wins, users who already knew you and were ready to buy. What’s left is a more accurate picture of how well your campaigns perform at generating new demand. This phase is where many advertisers flinch and roll back the change. Don’t. Give the algorithm time to relearn and stabilize around non-brand intent.

What Metrics Actually Matter

After brand exclusions, vanity metrics lose their shine. Here’s what you should be watching:

• Non-brand CTR: Are you attracting the right audiences without brand intent carrying the weight?
  
• Conversion Rate (CVR): Has quality dropped or held steady?
  
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA): Are you still acquiring customers efficiently once brand bias is removed?
  
• Impression Share (Search): Are you gaining visibility in new search categories?
  
• New vs. Returning Customer Ratio: Has the mix shifted toward new users, a good sign of prospecting health.

These are the numbers that separate genuine performance from brand-fueled illusion.

Communicating Results Internally

fIf you’re on the agency side, this step is crucial. Clients will see a drop in blended KPIs, and you’ll need to frame it correctly. Don’t sell it as a performance boost; sell it as a truth boost. 

Show pre- and post-exclusion metrics side by side. Highlight how your true non-brand CPA or new user acquisition has improved even if top-line numbers look weaker. That’s the maturity curve every advertiser needs to go through to truly scale profitably.

Bear in mind that smart bidding models take 2 – 3 weeks to stabilize after applying exclusions, it’s important to raise this early in order to manage expectations with clients. 

Common Pitfalls and Misconceptions about Brand Exclusions in Performance Max

Brand exclusions are a powerful tool, but like any advanced control, they’re easy to misuse. Too often, advertisers jump into exclusions expecting cleaner results and end up breaking their own campaigns. Here are some of the most common traps to avoid.

Excluding Too Early

Many advertisers rush to exclude brand terms right after launching PMax. That’s a mistake.
In the early stages, PMax relies on branded queries to learn what kind of audiences convert. Cutting that off too soon can stall the algorithm and tank performance. Wait until you have consistent data and stable delivery before applying exclusions.

Expecting Instant ROI Improvements

Brand exclusions don’t make your campaigns more profitable, they make them more honest. Once you exclude brand, your ROAS will almost always drop. That’s not failure; it’s reality. You’re finally seeing what your non-brand traffic is worth. Smart advertisers know how to use that data to make better budget decisions, not panic over the short-term dip.

Forgetting Brand Variants

Advertisers often exclude the core brand name and forget everything else, misspellings, plurals, and secondary product lines that include the brand. Google doesn’t automatically catch all of these. If your brand is “River & Oak,” you’ll need to add “River and Oak,” “R&O,” and even “River n Oak” to your exclusion list. Otherwise, leaks will happen, and your clean data won’t be clean.

Over-Segmenting Campaigns

Brand exclusions are about focus, not fragmentation. Splitting your account into dozens of micro PMax campaigns with slightly different exclusions usually hurts more than it helps. PMax works best with volume and clear signals, don’t choke it by trying to manually outsmart the system.

Conclusion: Clarity Over Comfort

Brand exclusions don’t make campaigns more complex; they make them more honest. They force your data to stand on its own, without the safety net of brand equity propping it up. And for agencies managing cross-channel budgets, that honesty is gold. It means better client conversations, cleaner testing, and sharper strategic calls.

In the end, running without brand terms isn’t about denying your brand,  it’s about defending it. You’re preserving its value, not letting automated systems take credit for awareness your team already built.

So yes, excluding your own name might sting the numbers for a while. But if your goal is to build smarter, stronger, more sustainable campaigns, it’s the kind of sting that means you’re growing in the right direction.

Remember: brand exclusions don’t make campaigns more profitable, they make them honest.

Want to see if your PMax campaigns are stealing from your brand? Inquire about our free clarity check to find out where your conversions are coming from.