How to Use Exclusions to Improve PMax Performance
Budget leaks in Performance Max rarely show up in neat reports. They hide in auto-matched queries, low-quality placements, and audiences that look “relevant” on paper but never convert. Exclusions are how smart advertisers stop that silent drain without choking the algorithm.
What Exclusions Actually Do in Performance Max
Performance Max is designed to cast a very wide net across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. That reach is powerful, but it can also pull in a lot of impressions and clicks that don’t help your goals. Exclusions act like guardrails, telling the system, “Explore, but stay out of these lanes.”
Early on, many advertisers were frustrated because controls felt too limited. That’s started to change. Google has now reversed its stance on some key controls and allows Performance Max campaigns to be influenced with placement exclusions via the API, as reported by Search Engine Land. That shift makes exclusions far more strategic than just a handful of negative keywords and a blocked URL list.
Used well, exclusions don’t fight automation. They refine it. The goal isn’t to manually control every impression. The goal is to give the algorithm a cleaner sandbox so it can find more of the right users, on the right surfaces, at the right time.
Why Thoughtful Exclusions Improve PMax Performance
Exclusions improve Performance Max in three main ways: they protect budget, sharpen signals, and align campaigns with real-world constraints like brand safety and sales priorities. When the system stops wasting effort in low-value areas, it can double down on the patterns that actually drive revenue.
Budget protection is the most obvious benefit. If your ads keep serving on traffic that never converts-kids content on YouTube, ultra-low-intent search queries, or audiences with no buying power-you are paying to train the algorithm in the wrong direction. Excluding non-performing segments cuts that noise and shortens the “learning” time required for PMax to stabilize.
Exclusions also improve signal quality. Performance Max learns from the data you allow it to collect. If half your impressions come from irrelevant placements, the model is learning from behavior that doesn’t match your true customer. Tightening where and to whom ads can show gives the system a clearer picture of what high-value users actually look like.
The Core Types of Exclusions You Can Use in PMax
Performance Max doesn’t expose every control that exists in Search or Display, but there are more levers than many advertisers realize. Thinking in terms of exclusion “buckets” makes it easier to design a strategy instead of reacting to annoying placements one by one.
Most practical PMax exclusion strategies revolve around four categories: keywords (especially brand), placements, audiences and data, and products or inventory. Each behaves a little differently inside PMax, so they need to be handled with intent-not copied blindly from your old campaign structure.
Below are the most impactful exclusion types and how to work with them without breaking the algorithm’s ability to learn.
Brand Keyword Exclusions: When to Protect Your Budget
Brand search is normally cheap, high-intent, and high-converting. That’s exactly why PMax loves to cannibalize it. If Performance Max can hit your target ROAS or CPA using mainly brand terms, it often will, which can hide what’s really happening on non-brand traffic. Many practitioners choose to exclude brand terms from PMax and handle them in a separate Search campaign instead, especially when budgets are tight or attribution needs to be cleaner.
Industry experts note that excluding brand terms tends to be a budget efficiency move, not a strict rule for every account. Hallam highlights that leaving brand in PMax can inflate performance metrics, while excluding brand is mainly recommended when you want to control spend on those queries more tightly and understand non-brand performance more clearly for budgeting decisions.
Placement Exclusions: Cleaning Up Where Your Ads Appear
Placement exclusions help control where Performance Max can serve ads across Google’s vast inventory. Historically, this was one of the most frustrating blind spots for PMax advertisers, because it was hard to keep ads out of low-quality or brand-unsafe environments. That’s changed significantly with the introduction of expanded placement controls via the API, which industry coverage from Search Engine Land has called out as a reversal of Google’s earlier position.
Effective placement exclusions usually start at a category level. For example, many B2B brands want to avoid children’s content, gaming channels, or ultra-casual entertainment that never produces qualified leads. From there, advertisers layer more granular exclusions-specific sites, apps, or YouTube channels that show up frequently but never convert or conflict with brand safety standards.
The power move now is to treat placement exclusions as a living policy instead of a one-time blocklist. As you gather more cross-channel data, placements that looked fine in theory may emerge as chronic underperformers. Excluding them via API or account-level settings helps focus spend on surfaces that actually move the needle.
Audience and Data Exclusions: Controlling Who Sees Your Ads
Audience and data exclusions stop your ads from serving to people who are either already covered elsewhere, unlikely to buy, or risky from a compliance or brand perspective. Inside PMax, these usually show up as excluded customer lists, specific life events or demographics, or segments that overlap with other campaigns where you want to preserve clean testing.
Common examples include excluding existing customers from acquisition-focused PMax campaigns, especially when they’re already being targeted with dedicated remarketing flows. Another is removing age groups or parental statuses that you know cannot purchase your product due to legal, pricing, or eligibility constraints. These decisions make the algorithm’s job easier by removing “false positives” from the learning pool.
Data exclusions also apply to conversion tracking. If your account has a period where tracking was broken or spam conversions polluted your signals, using data exclusions (at the account level) can prevent those corrupted signals from shaping PMax’s optimization logic going forward.
How to Decide What to Exclude (Without Killing Performance)
It’s tempting to exclude anything that looks slightly off, but overdoing it can leave PMax with too little freedom to explore. The art is in deciding what is “harmless noise” and what is actual waste or risk. That decision should be driven by numbers, not hunches, and by clear rules that everyone on your team understands.
A disciplined exclusion strategy usually follows a simple flow: identify repeat offenders, confirm that they are truly unprofitable or misaligned, test a partial restriction before a full block, and then monitor the downstream impact on volume and efficiency. This keeps you from overcorrecting when a bad week is just random variance rather than a structural issue.
It also helps to separate “must exclude” from “nice to exclude.” Anything that creates legal, brand safety, or compliance risk goes on the must-exclude list immediately. Non-performing but harmless traffic goes onto a watchlist and is handled with threshold-based rules, such as a minimum number of clicks with zero conversions before considering an exclusion.
Diagnose Wasted Spend Before You Exclude
The first step is to track where your money is actually going. That means pulling reports that approximate, as closely as possible, which queries, placements, and audiences are driving impressions and clicks. PMax won’t give you everything you’re used to from standard campaigns, but asset group previews, search term insights, and audience overviews still reveal patterns.
Start by sorting elements into buckets: obvious misalignment (for example, queries targeting job seekers when you sell to employers), clear underperformance (lots of spend, no conversions), and “weird but working.” That last category is important. Automation often uncovers intent signals that humans wouldn’t have predicted. Excluding those too quickly can crush incremental wins that only show up in blended account performance, not in tidy rows and columns.
When in doubt, compare performance trends before and after small changes. If a certain category of traffic appears messy, try narrowing geography, tightening audience signals, or improving creative relevance before turning to heavy-handed exclusions.
Protect High-Value Queries and Audiences
Some traffic is too valuable to leave entirely at the mercy of PMax’s internal budgeting decisions. Branded search, high-intent competitor terms, and bottom-of-funnel remarketing audiences often fall into this bucket. Instead of letting PMax monopolize them, many advertisers route those into tightly controlled Search or Display/Video campaigns with dedicated messaging and bids, while excluding them from PMax where possible.
This split approach also improves clarity. When PMax and standard campaigns are chasing the same users and queries, it becomes difficult to understand whether performance swings are caused by creative changes, budget shifts, or auction dynamics. Cleanly separating them via exclusions helps reveal what each campaign type is actually doing and where incremental lift is really coming from.
Over time, this structure builds a defensible strategy: PMax explores and scales, within guardrails, while standard campaigns protect your crown jewels and handle the precision work that still benefits from more granular control.
Practical Exclusion Setups for Common PMax Scenarios
Every account is different, but certain patterns show up again and again. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it helps to start from proven exclusion “templates” and then adapt them based on your vertical, budget, and risk tolerance.
Think of these as starting points, not rigid blueprints. They give PMax a healthy amount of freedom while carving out the most obvious sources of waste. Once the campaign is live, you then refine each setup with live data instead of guesswork.
Below are a few practical exclusion frameworks for the most common Performance Max use cases: lead generation, ecommerce, and local or service-based businesses.
Lead Generation: Filter Out the Time-Wasters
Lead gen advertisers often struggle with form fills that never answer the phone, leads outside their service area, and users who are just hunting for information rather than solutions. Exclusions can’t fix poor qualification processes, but they can significantly reduce obviously bad traffic before it hits your CRM.
Start by excluding geographies you don’t serve at the account or campaign level, then reinforce that message in your ads and landing pages. Layer audience exclusions for students or job seekers if your offer isn’t appropriate for them. On video and Display inventory, use placement exclusions to avoid entertainment content categories that consistently attract unqualified clicks.
For B2B lead gen, consider excluding existing customers or free-trial users from acquisition-focused PMax campaigns, and reserve them for a separate nurture program. This prevents your main campaign from optimizing toward low-value form submits while sales is still working existing relationships.
Ecommerce: Protect Margins and Inventory
Ecommerce brands tend to have a mix of hero products, long-tail catalog items, and seasonal inventory. Performance Max is excellent at uncovering demand for the long tail, but it can also pour budget into products with poor margin or limited stock. Excluding or de-prioritizing those products prevents the system from “winning” on paper while hurting your profitability in reality.
Use product exclusions or separate asset groups for low-margin or clearance items, so they don’t compete head-to-head with your bestsellers. If certain SKUs create frequent returns or customer support problems, consider excluding them from PMax altogether and handling them manually until their economics improve.
For brand safety, apply placement exclusions across shopping-oriented PMax campaigns to avoid sites or content that conflict with your positioning. Luxury brands, for example, often exclude bargain forums, user-uploaded resale sites, or content that clashes with their image, even if it could technically drive conversions.
Local and Service Businesses: Tighten Geography and Context
Local advertisers face a different challenge: paying for clicks from users who are either outside their true service radius or not looking for their specific type of service. PMax’s cross-network reach can amplify this problem if geography and context are not locked down.
In addition to precise location targeting, apply exclusions for regions, cities, or postal codes that are technically inside your broader geo but practically unreachable or unprofitable. Think about drive times, on-site staff capacity, and existing contracts when drawing those lines, not just map boundaries.
On top of that, use contextual and placement exclusions to avoid content types that attract curiosity clicks rather than serious intent. A plumbing company, for instance, may prefer to avoid DIY home improvement channels where users are more likely to fix problems themselves than hire a professional.
Pairing Exclusions with Strong Creative and Assets
Exclusions can’t rescue weak creative or poor offers. In fact, the more you constrain a campaign, the more important it becomes that every allowed impression counts. That’s where high-quality assets, especially video, can significantly change outcomes inside Performance Max.
Research shared by PPC Hero found that campaigns with at least one custom video asset can perform up to 12% better than those without that type of creative. If exclusions are cleaning up where your ads show and who sees them, compelling video and visual assets are what make those refined opportunities convert at a higher rate.
Before tightening exclusions aggressively, make sure your asset groups are fully stocked: strong headlines that reflect the queries you want, descriptions that pre-qualify users, images that match your landing pages, and at least one quality video that speaks directly to your best customers. When the creative clearly signals who the offer is for, the algorithm has an easier time distinguishing high-intent users from casual browsers.
Testing, Monitoring, and Iterating on Exclusions
Exclusions should rarely be “set and forget.” Markets evolve, Google’s inventory shifts, and your own business priorities change. An exclusion strategy that made sense six months ago can become a constraint today, especially if your brand grows into new audiences or channels.
Approach exclusions like any other optimization: design explicit tests, apply changes in a controlled way, and measure over a meaningful window rather than reacting to day-to-day noise. When you apply a new category of placement exclusions, for instance, note the date and expected impact-maybe a slight drop in volume with improved CPA-and then resist the urge to reverse course instantly if results wobble for a few days.
Also pay attention to macro-level performance. If your blended account metrics (across all campaigns) improve after tightening PMax exclusions, that’s a strong signal that the algorithm is now focusing on more valuable impressions, even if individual surface-level metrics like impressions or clicks drop.
Make the Most of New API-Level Controls
The expansion of API-based controls for Performance Max placement exclusions opens the door to more sophisticated strategies. Instead of relying solely on manual reviews and static lists, advertisers can now integrate their own rules, brand safety tools, or third-party intelligence to update exclusions dynamically. Industry coverage has emphasized that these API options give brands far more influence over PMax inventory than they had when the format first launched.
That means teams can build workflows where poor-performing placements, or those that trip internal brand safety checks, are automatically flagged and excluded. Over time, this creates a feedback loop: as your system learns which environments never produce quality conversions, it steadily narrows the sandbox for PMax while still allowing Google’s algorithms to operate within that refined space.
Even without heavy automation, staying aware of these API capabilities helps you ask better questions of your internal dev team or agency partners. If exclusions are still being managed entirely by hand, there may be untapped efficiency in moving some of that logic into code.
Why Work With a Specialist Partner on PMax Exclusions
Performance Max is powerful, but it is also opaque. Making the right exclusion decisions requires a mix of platform fluency, statistical judgment, and deep understanding of your business model. Many teams either over-restrict the algorithm out of fear or leave it too open and then struggle to explain volatile results to stakeholders.
At North Country Consulting, we treat exclusions as a strategic layer, not a checkbox. We map your actual business constraints-margin thresholds, sales capacity, lead quality, geographic realities, brand safety requirements-onto PMax structures and exclusion policies that the algorithm can understand. That includes deciding when to exclude brand terms for budget efficiency, when to keep them in for coverage, and how to separate brand and non-brand performance in a way that makes sense for your reporting, drawing on best practices highlighted by respected agencies like Hallam.
We’re unapologetically opinionated about this: brands get better outcomes when their PMax campaigns are designed and monitored by specialists who know how to balance control with automation. That’s why North Country Consulting positions PMax exclusions as a core service, not an afterthought. When we manage Performance Max, we don’t just launch campaigns-we build and maintain the guardrails that keep Google’s automation working in your favor, not against your goals.
Ready to optimize your Google Ads Performance Max campaigns with precision? At North Country Consulting, our expertise is deeply rooted in our founder's extensive experience at Google and leading revenue teams at major startups like Stripe and Apollo.io. We specialize in turning your ecommerce and lead generation efforts into high-performing successes. Don't let the complexities of PMax hold you back. Book a free consultation with us today and discover how our tailored exclusion strategies can boost your ROAS and streamline your digital marketing efforts.