Search targeting & controls for Performance Max
About negative keywords
Performance Max automatically finds relevant queries, however, you may encounter situations where you want to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant or brand-unsafe terms.
For this purpose, you can use negative keywords, which block ads from serving for queries that match the negative keywords. Learn more about applying negative keywords in Performance Max campaigns
Note: Use brand exclusions instead of negative keywords to avoid paying for clicks on your own brand name. Brand exclusions offer more complete protection by automatically blocking common misspellings, variants, and subsidiary brands.
Usage recommendation: Use negative keywords only for essential brand safety needs or to block completely irrelevant terms. This is a highly restrictive control that can harm performance by preventing the AI from finding valuable traffic. It is strongly recommended to use brand exclusions to exclude brand searches instead of negative keywords.
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