Here's a pattern I see in almost every account audit. Performance Max is smashing it. 8x ROAS, low CPA, huge conversion volume. The client's rapt. Meanwhile the brand Search campaign that used to do most of the work is limping along on a fraction of its old impression share, and nobody's quite sure why.
Nobody adjusted a bid. Nobody paused a keyword. What happened is that PMAX quietly ate the brand queries, took credit for the conversions, and Google made sure the setting to stop it is buried under "More settings" so most people never touch it.
If your PMAX campaign looks suspiciously good, this is almost always the first place to look.
What Performance Max does with brand terms by default
Performance Max is allowed to bid on every query type across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display and Discover. Google doesn't ask you which queries to target. It figures that out from your assets, your feed, your audience signals, and whatever converts fastest.
The queries that convert fastest and cheapest in almost every account are brand queries. Someone typing "your business name" is already a customer or a warm lead. Conversion rates are 5x to 15x higher than non-brand, CPCs are a fraction of what a cold query costs, and the bid strategy loves it.
So PMAX prioritises brand. It's doing exactly what you told it to do. The problem is that those conversions would have happened anyway, at lower cost, in your brand Search campaign, which is now getting outbid in its own auction by the same account.
Why this makes PMAX look better than it is
Two things happen at once.
PMAX's reported ROAS goes up. Brand queries convert at 20-40% for most accounts, versus 2-5% on cold non-brand traffic. Once brand is in the mix, PMAX's blended numbers get pulled up by the cheap, hot conversions.
Your brand campaign's numbers go down. Impression share collapses, conversions drop, CPA looks worse. If you don't realise what's happening, the natural reaction is to shift more budget into PMAX because it's clearly working. Which gives PMAX more room to eat more brand queries. Which makes it look even better. Rinse and repeat until the whole account is basically one giant, overpriced brand campaign wearing a PMAX costume.
I audited an ecom account earlier this year where PMAX was showing a 6.2x ROAS. After enabling brand exclusions and letting the numbers settle for two weeks, real ROAS on the cold traffic PMAX was actually driving was 2.1x. Still profitable, but a completely different conversation with the client about where to allocate the next dollar. Take those numbers with the usual grain of salt, but the direction is the same in every account I've checked.
The fix: brand exclusions
Google introduced brand exclusions for Performance Max in 2024, then improved them in 2025 with support for misspellings, variants and subsidiary brands. In 2026 they also let you add up to 10,000 negative keywords directly on the campaign, which is useful for edge cases but not the main tool.
Brand exclusions live in Campaign Settings → More settings → Brand exclusions on the PMAX campaign. Yeah, "More settings". That's how you know Google isn't in a hurry for you to find it. See Google's own doc on applying brand exclusions for the click path.
The setup is three steps:
- Build a brand list at the account level under Tools → Shared library → Brand lists. Add your primary brand name, common misspellings the tool doesn't catch, product line names that people search for directly, and any subsidiary brands.
- Apply the brand list to every PMAX campaign under the Brand exclusions setting.
- Give it a week and check the search terms insights in PMAX to make sure brand queries have actually dropped out. If a few still slip through, add them as negatives on the campaign or update the brand list.
That's it. It's a five minute job that shifts brand conversions back to the campaigns that were built for them, exposes what PMAX is actually doing on cold traffic, and gives you real numbers to make decisions on.
What counts as a "brand term"
More than most people think. When you build your brand list, include:
- Your business name and legal name. "Beech PPC" and "Beech PPC Pty Ltd" both belong on the list.
- Common misspellings. Google's automatic matching catches obvious ones, but it misses a lot. Look at your existing brand campaign's search terms and add anything that's clearly a typo of your name.
- Product line names people search for by name. If someone types "Superhero Super" or "ClassPass Melbourne", that's a brand query. The product name is a proper noun in the searcher's head.
- Sub-brands and campaign names. If you've run a big enough campaign that the campaign name gets searched, treat it as brand.
- Geographic + brand combinations. "Beech PPC Melbourne" is still brand.
Miss any of these and PMAX will find them and eat them. It's very good at that.
When brand terms in PMAX are actually fine
This is short. Two situations.
You genuinely don't have a brand Search campaign and don't intend to build one. Small local business, no brand search volume worth chasing, PMAX picking up the occasional brand query isn't costing you anything you'd otherwise have. Fine.
You've run a proper controlled test showing PMAX drives incremental brand conversions your brand campaign wouldn't have won. I've seen this maybe once, in an account with unusual search behaviour where PMAX's YouTube inventory was catching queries the brand campaign missed. Rare. Test before you assume it's you.
Everything else, exclude brand from PMAX. Full stop.
Related mistakes I usually find at the same time
If PMAX is eating brand, the account usually has two other things going wrong.
No brand campaign at all, on the theory that "we rank organically, we don't need to pay for our own name". That's a whole separate argument I'll write up another time, but the short version: if a competitor's bidding on your brand and you're not, they're stealing your customers. Add the brand campaign, then apply the PMAX exclusion so the brand campaign gets to do its job.
PMAX and brand Search running with no shared budget logic, so you can't actually tell which one is doing the work. Segment the accounts properly before drawing conclusions from the reports. My post on Performance Max vs Search campaigns walks through when each earns its place.
My take
Google shipped brand exclusions because agencies and PPC specialists were shouting about the cannibalisation problem for two years. They still buried the setting under "More settings", which tells you exactly how much Google wants advertisers to turn it on. If you're managing a PMAX campaign and you haven't checked whether brand exclusions are enabled, that's the single best 5 minutes you'll spend on the account this quarter. It doesn't matter how sophisticated the rest of the account is if PMAX is quietly reallocating half the credit to itself.
The default settings in most Google Ads campaign types serve Google's revenue, not yours. Brand exclusions on PMAX is one of the clearest examples of that. Turn it on.
Key Takeaways
- Performance Max bids on brand queries by default because they convert fastest and cheapest, which inflates PMAX's reported ROAS and starves your brand Search campaign.
- Brand exclusions live under Campaign Settings, then More settings, then Brand exclusions. Google buried them on purpose.
- Build a brand list at the account level under Tools, then Shared library, then Brand lists. Include misspellings, product names, sub-brands, and geo variants.
- Apply the brand list to every PMAX campaign, wait a week, then verify brand queries have dropped out of PMAX's search terms insights.
- If PMAX's ROAS drops after enabling brand exclusions, that wasn't PMAX's ROAS. It was your brand campaign's ROAS being reported on the wrong campaign.
- Almost every account has this misconfigured. It's usually the fastest, cleanest win in a Google Ads audit.
If your PMAX numbers look too good to be true and your brand Search campaign has been quietly declining, that's exactly the pattern this fixes. Get in touch if you want a second pair of eyes on it.