Solved: PMax Ignoring Negative Keywords?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this. What you're experiencing with Performance Max is incredibly common, and honestly, one of the biggest frustrations for advertisers who are used to the control we had with old-school search campaigns. The short answer is yes, this is everyone's experience, but the reasons why and what you can actually do about it are a bit more involved. It's less about fighting the system and more about learning how to structure your account to work *with* it. I'll walk you through my thinking on it below.

We'll need to look at why PMax is ignoring your brand negatives...

First off, lets get one thing straight. The idea that you can bolt on a few negative keywords to a PMax campaign and have it behave like a traditional search campaign is a myth. It’s the biggest misconception I see, and it’s the source of so much wasted time and money. You have to fundamentally change how you think about it.

PMax is a black box by design. Its job isn't just to respond to search queries; its a full-funnel automation engine that operates across Google's entire inventory—Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. You give it a budget, a conversion goal (like a target CPA or ROAS), and some creative assets, and you tell it to go find customers. The algorithm's single-minded goal is to hit that target you've set, using any and all means at its disposal.

So, think about it from the algorithm's perspective. What are the absolute highest-intent, most likely-to-convert search terms available? Your brand terms, of course. Someone searching for your company name is practically knocking on the door with their wallet out. For PMax, ignoring those searches would be like a fisherman ignoring a fish that's already jumped into the boat. It would be actively working *against* the very goal you've given it: find conversions efficiently.

This is why adding brand negatives often feels like it does nothing. You’re giving the system a gentle suggestion ("please don't bid on brand"), but its core directive ("GET CONVERSIONS AT THIS COST") is screaming louder. When push comes to shove, the core directive will always win. The system has learned that brand terms are the most reliable path to hitting its target, so it's going to prioritise them, regardless of your negative list. This is especially true if you're not feeding it enough data or budget to find non-brand conversions at scale. It defaults to what it knows works. Realising this is the first step to stop banging your head against a brick wall. The problem isn't that PMax is broken; its that your trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail.

I remember one B2B software client who was in the exact same boat. They were spending thousands, getting furious that all their PMax 'conversions' were just existing customers searching their brand name to log in. Their negative list was a mile long. The moment we stopped fighting the campaign and restructured the account, everything changed. It’s not about control in the old sense; it’s about strategic influence.

I'd say you need to restructure your account...

So, if fighting PMax directly with negatives is a losing battle, what's the answer? You change the battlefield. The single most effective strategy we use for every client running PMax is to build a firewall around our brand traffic with a seperate, dedicated Standard Search campaign. This isn't just a workaround; it's the correct, modern way to structure a Google Ads account.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a Dedicated Brand Search Campaign

This is a standard, old-fashioned Search campaign. Not PMax. Its sole purpose is to catch anyone searching specifically for you.

• Keywords: You'll use a tight list of phrase and exact match keywords for your brand name and any common variations or misspellings. Think `[your brand name]`, `"your brand name"`, `[yourbrand.com]`, etc.
• Ads: The ad copy here can be hyper-specific. You can talk to existing customers, announce new features, or direct them to a login page. You have total control over the messaging, which PMax robs you of.
• Budget: This campaign will likely be very efficient. Clicks will be cheap because your quality score will be perfect (it's your own brand!), and conversion rates will be high. You don't need a huge budget here, just enough to ensure you have 95%+ impression share on your own terms.

The goal of this campaign is twofold. First, it acts as a defensive shield. It ensures that when someone looks for you, they find *you*, with the exact message you want them to see, and not a competitor who might be bidding on your name. Second, it effectively 'catches' all that brand traffic and isolates it, reporting on it cleanly and cheaply.

2. Let Your PMax Campaign Focus on Acqusition

Now that your brand campaign is catching all the brand-intent traffic, PMax is forced to look elsewhere for conversions. It has to go out and do the job you actually hired it for: finding *new* customers who don't know you yet.

• Goal: Set this campaign's objective squarely on new customer acquisition. If you have the option in your account, use the "New Customer Acquisition" goal and provide your customer list so it can actively exclude them.
• Audience Signals: This is now your primary steering wheel. Instead of negatives, you guide PMax by giving it strong signals about who to look for. Upload your customer list and create lookalike audiences. Build custom segments based on people who search for your competitors' terms or browse specific industry websites. These signals are far more powerful than a negative keyword list.
• Assets: Your images, videos, and ad copy should all be geared towards a cold audience. Assume they've never heard of you. Focus on their pain points, your unique value proposition, and a clear call to action.

By splitting the account this way, you create a system where each campaign has a clear, distinct job. The Brand Campaign protects your turf. The PMax Campaign goes hunting for new business. They work in tandem instead of tripping over each other.

You probably should use account-level negatives instead...

Now, this doesn't mean negative keywords are completely useless. They just have a different, more strategic role to play. Instead of trying to add them to your PMax campaign to control its search targeting (which, as we've established, is a mugs game), you should be using account-level negative keywords.

These are set in the main settings of your Google Ads account, not within an individual campaign. The critical difference is that the system tends to respect these far more rigorously. Think of them as universal rules that apply across your entire account, including PMax. You're telling Google, "Under no circumstances do I ever want my business to appear for these terms, no matter the campaign."

This is not the place for your brand terms. This is for the junk traffic that is irrelevant to any and all of your campaigns. A good starting list for most businesses would include things like:

• Employment-related terms: `jobs`, `careers`, `salary`, `hire`, `recruitment`
• Information-seeking (non-commercial): `reviews`, `what is`, `how to`, `free`, `torrent`, `download`
• Irrelevant actions: `login`, `support`, `contact number` (if you want them to use a form)
• Known competitor names: If you have a clear strategy to *not* bid on competitors, you can add them here.

By using account-level negatives, you're performing essential hygiene that cleans up the quality of traffic for your *entire* account. It stops PMax, your brand campaign, and any other campaigns from wasting money on clicks from people who are fundamentally not looking to buy what you sell. It’s a much smarter, more efficient use of the negative keyword feature.

You'll need to rethink how you measure success...

Once you adopt this new structure, your measurement philosophy has to change too. The days of poring over search term reports for a single campaign to judge its performance are over, at least for PMax. Because it’s a black box that influences users across so many touchpoints, looking at its direct, last-click conversions is deeply misleading.

PMax will try to take credit for everything. It might show a YouTube ad to someone who then searches your brand name a week later and converts via your Brand campaign. Which campaign gets the credit? In Google's eyes, PMax played a role. This is where you need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

The key metric becomes your blended ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) or blended CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) across the entire account. You need to ask:

"For my total ad spend across all campaigns (Brand + PMax), what is my total revenue/number of leads?"

This holistic view tells you the true story of your marketing's efficiency. Is the overall machine working? Is total revenue increasing at a profitable rate relative to total spend? That’s what matters. You can't get bogged down in analysing PMax in a vacuum, because it doesn't operate in one.

The Brand campaign gives you a clean baseline of your existing demand, and PMax's job is to lift the overall total. If your PMax spend is increasing and your total revenue (the blended result) is increasing profitably, it's working. If your PMax spend is increasing but your total revenue is flat, then PMax is likely just cannibalising sales that would have happened anyway through other channels, and you need to revisit your audience signals and creative. The calculator below can help you model this out and see how the numbers interact.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To pull all this together, here’s a straightforward table of the strategy I’ve outlined. This is the exact approach we take with our clients to tame PMax and turn it into a genuine growth engine rather than a frustrating money pit.

As you can see, managing PMax effectively is a genuine strategic shift. It requires a different structure, a different measurement approach, and a different way of thinking. It’s less about micromanaging keywords and more about being a good portfolio manager: you set up the right systems, feed them high-quality information, and judge them on their overall, blended performance.

Trying to manage this yourself can be a steep learning curve, and mistakes can be costly. This is where getting expert help can make a significant difference. An experienced consultant or agency can implement this structure correctly from day one, help you identify the most potent audience signals for your specific business, and manage the ongoing optimisation process to ensure your budget is actually driving growth, not just circling the drain on brand searches.

Hope that helps clear things up! It's a complex topic but getting this structure right is fundamental to making Google Ads work in 2024.

We offer a completely free, no-obligation consultation where we can take a look at your account and provide a more detailed, tailored plan of action. If that's something you'd be interested in, please feel free to book a call.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh