Performance Max has a favorite kind of conversion: the person who typed your brand name into Google and was going to buy from you anyway. Left alone, the campaign will happily spend budget intercepting that traffic, then report it back as performance. The ROAS looks wonderful and the incrementality is fiction — those customers were already yours. Google's answer to this is brand exclusions: a campaign setting that tells Performance Max to sit out searches that mention your brand, so the budget goes to finding new customers instead of re-buying existing ones. Here's the full setup, including the two catches nobody mentions until they've cost you a month.
Why not just use negative keywords?
You can — Performance Max now accepts campaign-level negative keywords, and we've written up exactly how to add them. But for brand traffic specifically, exclusions are the better tool, because a brand exclusion isn't a string match. When you exclude a brand, Google automatically covers its misspellings, abbreviations, translations, and close variants — the whole cloud of ways people mangle your name into a search box. Reproducing that with negative keywords means maintaining a list of every typo your customers can invent, forever. Exclude the brand entity once and Google maintains the variants for you.
Build the brand list first
Brand exclusions run on brand lists, which live in the Shared Library so one list can serve many campaigns. Go to Tools → Shared library → Brand lists, create a new list, and search for your brand. Here's catch number one: the picker searches Google's own database of recognized brands, not free text. If your brand appears, select it, name the list something durable (you'll be reading this name in campaign settings for years), and save. You can also create a list inline from the campaign's exclusion picker via + New brand list, but building it in the Shared Library keeps it findable when a second campaign needs it.
If your brand isn't in the database
Smaller and newer brands often aren't. The picker includes a Request a brand option — submit the brand name with your website URL, and Google reviews the addition. The catch is the clock: processing takes roughly 4 to 6 weeks. That makes this a do-it-today task even if the campaign launch is next quarter. In the interim, cover the gap with campaign-level negative keywords for your brand's main spellings — imperfect, but it stops the worst of the cannibalization while the request works through review.
Apply the list to the campaign
Open the Performance Max campaign and go to Settings, expand Additional settings at the bottom, and click Brand exclusions. Pick your brand list from the dropdown and save. That's the whole application step — the work was building the list. The setting is per-campaign, so if you run several Performance Max campaigns, apply the list to each one; the Shared Library list means you only ever maintain the brand definitions once.
Decide on the Shopping toggle
Inside the same setting sits a checkbox: "Allow Shopping ads on searches that mention excluded brands." Ticked, it carves out an exception — your text ads stay off brand searches, but Shopping ads may still show. Retailers often want this: a searcher typing your brand plus a product name is frequently comparison-shopping, and a Shopping placement there defends the sale visually. Pure lead-gen accounts usually leave it off. Either answer is defensible; the mistake is not knowing the toggle exists and wondering why Shopping traffic still carries brand queries.
Know what the exclusion actually covers
Brand exclusions in Performance Max apply to search-driven inventory — Search, Shopping, and YouTube search. They are not a content filter for the rest of the Performance Max surface: Display, in-stream YouTube, Discover, and Gmail placements aren't query-driven, so a brand exclusion has nothing to grab onto there. That's the division of labor to remember — brand exclusions own the query side, while placement exclusions and negative keywords handle the rest. It's also why the feature pairs naturally with a negative keyword list rather than replacing one.
Check that it's working
Give it a few days, then look at two places. In the campaign's Insights, the search themes and search terms picking up traffic should go generic — brand terms should fade out. And if you run a dedicated brand Search campaign, its impressions should firm up as Performance Max stops competing for the same queries. Expect the Performance Max campaign's reported ROAS to dip: that's not the campaign getting worse, that's the brand subsidy leaving the number. What remains is the figure you can actually plan against — what the campaign earns on customers it found itself.
Where this fits in the account
Brand exclusions are one of a small set of controls Google has gradually handed back to Performance Max advertisers, and they compound: exclusions keep the campaign honest about incrementality, negative keywords prune the queries the exclusion can't see, and audience settings like household income targeting shape who the prospecting budget chases. None of it is set-and-forget — but each control is a ten-minute setup that permanently improves what the campaign's numbers mean. Cheap, boring, and worth doing this week.