Build a Negative Keyword List for Google Performance Max

Google Performance Max (PMax) campaigns promise an AI-driven approach to advertising by automating tasks such as keyword bidding. While this sounds perfect in theory, many advertisers discover that, in practice, AI alone can’t capture every detail of their business. This often leads to overspending on irrelevant searches or the unintended targeting of brand keywords at high CPC rates.

The good news is that Google has announced it will increase the negative keyword limit to 10,000 in the next couple of weeks. Adding negative keywords can significantly optimize where your ads appear.

Below are two primary reasons why a well-structured negative keyword strategy can address these issues.

1. Google PMax Targets Your Brand Keywords at High CPC

There’s no doubt that your brand keywords typically have a high conversion rate. In most cases, due to competition, you should advertise your brand keywords; otherwise, your competitors will rank higher for your brand terms.

From Google’s point of view, your brand name often converts well, so it optimizes those terms for higher conversions and ROAS. However, this can drive up CPCs unnecessarily. Your brand terms can also eat into your budget, leaving fewer resources for non-branded, growth-focused keywords. When you separate brand and non-brand keywords, you have more flexibility in setting different goals or strategies.

We suggest you create a separate campaign to isolate branded terms (and any close variants) as negative keywords. Monitor this new campaign’s performance closely and adjust your budget. Remember, the new campaign targets growth-focused keywords, so performance will likely be lower than targeting branded keywords.

It’s not just our perspective; Google also sees the value in this approach and added a brand-negative keyword option after launching the PMax ads model.

2. Google PMax Targets Irrelevant Keywords for Your Business

AI optimizes based on historical data. It doesn’t truly understand your business model or audience behavior on a human level. It may initially allocate budget to inappropriate keywords until it learns they don’t convert.?

For example, if you’re selling luxury products, you generally don’t want your ads to show for “free” keywords. Google often won’t recognize the mismatch between “luxury” and “free” until you’ve spent money on those keywords and observed poor performance, resulting in a wasted budget.

You can train the algorithm by excluding irrelevant keywords, preventing budget waste.

heybooster can simplify keyword analysis, helping you quickly identify underperforming queries by cost, CTR, or relevance. You can use these insights to refine your negative keyword list.

• Low CTR can signal that specific keywords aren’t engaging your audience.
• High CPC can indicate highly competitive keywords; you may need different strategies to address them.
• High spending can show popular keywords. If your conversion rate is also high for those terms, consider creating separate campaigns for them with unique strategies.

I’ve also explained this in a video. If you prefer watching, you can check it out below.

heybooster provides analysis to help you take control of your marketing performance. Keyword analysis will help you to discover irrelevant keywords triggered under Pmax.?

Here is the link to create an account and access your analysis with one click.

If you prefer to meet with an expert to learn more about these insights, here is a link to schedule a meeting.