Brand exclusions
Brand exclusions are campaign-level controls that stop Performance Max and other automated campaigns from serving on searches for your own brand, keeping brand traffic in dedicated campaigns.
Without exclusions, PMax happily "wins" searches from people already typing your name — traffic that would have converted anyway — and reports them as performance. This inflates ROAS, contaminates incrementality reads, and hides the true cost of prospecting.
The standard architecture: a dedicated brand search campaign with exact control, brand lists excluded from PMax and non-brand search, and separate reporting so leadership sees prospecting economics undiluted by brand harvest.
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