Performance Max Brand Exclusions: Making the Campaign Find New Customers
Performance Max brand exclusions stop the campaign from serving ads on searches for your own brand name. Without them, Performance Max is free to collect branded demand you already own and report it as new sales. With them in place, the campaign has to go and find buyers who were not already looking for you.
Why does Performance Max drift toward your brand name?
Performance Max is built to maximize the conversion value it can record at the target you set. Branded searches convert at a very high rate and cost relatively little per click, so from the algorithm’s point of view they are the easiest conversions in the account. Left alone, a meaningful share of spend can flow toward them, and the campaign’s reported return climbs while the number of new customers it brings in barely moves. Because Performance Max reports several inventory types as one campaign, the pattern is hard to spot from the summary view. The campaign looks brilliant. The business sees the same customers it would have had anyway. None of this is a flaw in the product. It is the product doing exactly what its goal instructed, which is why the goal and the limits you place around it matter so much more than any single setting.
How do you set brand exclusions properly?
Brand exclusions work from brand lists in your Google Ads account. Build a list containing your brand name and its common variants and misspellings, then apply it to each Performance Max campaign. Afterwards, check search terms insights to confirm branded queries have dropped out, and give the campaign time to settle, since results often dip before they recover as spend is pushed toward new demand. Keep a separate branded search campaign where brand defense is justified, so that protection is sized and reported on its own. Two cautions apply. Brand exclusions govern search and Shopping inventory, so keep reviewing channel and placement reporting rather than assuming every branded touch has gone. And if resellers or affiliates sell your products under your name, decide deliberately whether their terms belong inside the exclusion or outside it. Revisit the list whenever you launch a product line with its own name, since new branded terms can slip back into the campaign unnoticed.
What should the campaign be judged on after the exclusion?
Once branded demand is removed, Performance Max needs a different scorecard. Reported ROAS will usually fall, and that is the intended outcome rather than a problem. This is the structure I would expect any ecommerce Google Ads agency to put in place before asking for more budget. The measures that matter are new customer share of the campaign’s conversions, new customer acquisition cost reconciled against store data, and contribution margin by product group. Split asset groups or campaigns by margin tier so high margin products can clear a lower return target. Supply real creative instead of relying on images Google assembles by itself. Where Standard Shopping gives you tighter control over a set of products, keep it running beside Performance Max. Pushing more money into a campaign that lives on your own name mostly pays twice for customers you already had.
How long before the numbers make sense again?
Expect a few weeks of noise. The campaign has to relearn with a narrower set of opportunities, and reported conversions will usually fall before new customer counts show whether the change worked. Hold the budget steady through that window rather than reacting to daily swings, and read results weekly against a baseline recorded before the exclusion went live: new customer counts, blended acquisition cost and branded search volume in your store data. If total branded orders hold while Performance Max’s reported revenue falls, you have learned how much of that revenue was already yours. If new customer counts rise over the following month, the campaign has started doing the job its name suggests. Either outcome is useful, because the account is now telling you something true. Write down what you learned before the next budget conversation, so the finding survives beyond the week it was discovered.
Here is the kind of standard worth holding to. A lifestyle apparel brand grew new customer revenue from $879,650 in Q1 2025 to $6,060,308 in Q1 2026. That is a blended figure across the whole paid mix rather than a Performance Max result, and the point is the measure itself: new customers, not revenue a single campaign can claim for itself.
The free 30 minute growth audit checks your Performance Max settings, brand exclusions included, and leaves you with three fixes to make whether or not we work together afterwards.
