Since the dawn of age, human wanted to control everything they come across. Performance Max or PMax, in short, is not an exception.

"How can I control my Performance Max campaign?", is the most asked question in digital marketing these days. They are easy to start, So everyone starts it and It is easy to maintain, So everyone wants it, but it is very difficult to control.However, the situation is not completely new.We had a similar situation with another famous campaign type in Google ads.

Universal app install campaign or UAC in short. 

However, App campaigns had a comparatively short history pre-UAC that came into the picture in  2017, but not the search campaigns. They have been available for decades and are synonyms for pay-per-click(PPC).

One effective way to control the PMax campaign is by keyword negation. Other options like bids, budget, and feed are only marginally effective. So today's post is about ways to keyword negation in PMax.

It can be done in three ways.

1. Account level negative

This option is not even available for UAC. So, PMax must be something special. However, this is a double-edged sword. If you add account-level negative keywords, you can't bid for them at all. A tactical move is to have two accounts, one for PMax and one for all other campaigns. Make sure they both come under the same MCC.

2. Brand Exclusion

Google rolled this out recently. I wrote about it a few back back. You can give meta instructions to the campaign to restrict ads in certain brands.  Originally designed to help brands not to bid on certain partners & competitors. But many brands are using it to remove their brand keyword targeting from PMax,but we should note that it may not block sub-brands, product collections, or abbreviated versions of your brand name.

3. Adding Negative Keywords through Google Support

This is the most reliable method. Marketers have been doing the UAC campaign for many years now, and it works perfectly. You should create a Keyword list and ask the account manager(for large accounts) and Google support for small accounts to exclude from the campaign. This way, you can modify the list for later.

Bonus.

If you have two campaigns with the same keyword - one with the phrase and one with an exact keyword- and the bids and optimization are the same for both campaigns, the exact match campaign takes precedence over the phrase march campaign when going into the auction.

I haven't seen this happening 100% of the time. However, Google says so. 

Similarly, if you are running a Branded Search campaign, this will take precedence over Performance Max wherever you have an "Identical Match" keyword in Search as per Google's official information but not sure whether it happens all the time.

Content Reviewed By : Jagadeesh.J