How to Exclude Brand Terms from Performance Max Campaigns Using Brand Exclusion Lists

Hey, fellow advertisers, business owners, or anyone who's just interested in Google Ads. I guess this is Austin from Grow My Ads and in today's video I'm going to share how to exclude brand terms from your Performance Max campaigns. Google, you know, made it pretty much impossible in the beginning to add your brand terms as a negative keyword to the Performance Max campaigns. And the only way to really go about it is you'd have to contact a Google rep, give them a list of your brand terms to add as negatives. There were no settings that you could actually see that they applied. So then you would just have to monitor the Insights tab just to see when your brand terms would stop showing in that reporting. A lot of people do not want their brand terms being shown in their Performance Max campaigns because it does skew the data. We all know Performance Performance Max loves taking a lot of the good from the other standard campaigns, from your search, from your discovery remarketing, dsa, et cetera. And of course it wanted to take brand terms as well. It's a whole nother controversial topic, I guess in the community I still see some strategies of just keeping it in there. But if you don't want your brand term showing and you are building a Performance Max campaign, Google actually came out, they did listen to the community a little bit, which is surprising. And they made it so you could add your brand as an actual exclusion, not a keyword, but this brand exclusion list. So what exactly is that and how to do it? I'm going to show you that right now. So if we go into their little support page here, I just kind of wanted to show you where this is. So you see how to use brand suitability, features and Performance Max excluded or exclude branded traffic, competitor, partner or your own brands. So you actually can add your competitors in there as well, which is a nice feature. So they have this thing called brand exclusions. Here's the page. I'll probably add this in the description as well for you, but let's hop into an account real quick. I'm just show you how to do it. So I'm going to hop into the Performance Max campaign here. I'm going to go to the Settings tab and then if you go all the way down to this additional settings, it kind of hide it a little bit. Here we go, Brand exclusions. You'll see we don't have anything here added, but if we wanted to add our brand. This is a brand, by the way, called Home Reserve. I've done other videos on them. You should go check them out. If you're looking for sectional furniture or sectional sofas, they, they're a great company. So I do like using their account quite a bit and I like plugging them in almost any video I talk to them about. So it's kind of a win win here. With that said. So I could add their branded terms here and it actually would exclude it. So it's not a keyword. So key, you know, negative keywords, you add the keyword and you say, hey, stop showing my ads for these keywords. So when you had brand negatives applied to search campaigns or even back in standard shopping campaigns, you kind of had to go through and add, you can't just add your, you know, for home reserve, for example, if I just add home reserve, well it doesn't negate then the misspellings and other phrases of how people search home reserve. So you always had to stay on top of that. Brand exclusion does a pretty good job. Google knows the index terms for home reserve's brand and it's kind of a blanket negative for any of the home reserve terms. So you don't just don't have to worry about it anymore. So, so here I would actually just click this and hit save and that would apply it. Now where, where can you go to build this? Just not even in the performance max campaign. And then also what if you don't have your brand? What if you don't find it? I'm going to show you what to do. So you can go up to tools and settings, you can go to brand list under your shared library. So I'm going to go there right now and I'm just going to do a test. So this is test. Cause test is obviously not a brand. Maybe it is, but we're running this as a test. So if I go to enter brand, I'm going to hit test. Ooh, doesn't show up. Right. So then you can go to request a brand and in here you can enter your brand name, you can give them your website information. It does say it takes four to six weeks. I've actually never had to request a brand yet. But this is how you would do it. So if you don't see your brand name in that sort of search function for this brand list that you would add, that is you would just come down here, hit request a brand, you would add it, you'd send it to Google and Google then apply it. So for home reserve again, who this count is right here. So they actually already have home reserve indexed and I just hit save. I already made this before this video so it's right here and then it's added to our Performance Max campaign. And how you check hey, am I getting brand terms or not? You would come to your insights tab here. Just keep an eye out on that. So if you had brand term showing there previously and then you add your brand exclusion list to the campaign over time in the data, you should no longer see any of your brand terms show up here. One tip, if you do exclude your brand. I've seen this in audits before. If you exclude your brand from your performance max campaign, make sure to add a regular standard shopping campaign to hit those brand terms. Now I've done audits where I'm like guys, I Google your name. Your shopping ads don't even appear. It's because you negated your brand from Performance max where your shopping feed and shopping ads are running. And then you did not at least create a sort of catch all standard shopping campaign to catch those brand terms. So there's nowhere for Google to show a shopping ad for your brand terms right now. So just remember, if you negate brand from pmax, make sure you build a standard shopping campaign to hit those brand terms as well. I hope you found this valuable again. I'll have some of this information in the description below. I'll see you on the next video. Thanks.