Google Ads Performance Max Adds Brand Exclusions, Page Feeds, Video Creation & More Reporting

Google Ads announced four new features coming soon to Performance Max, including campaign-level brand exclusions, page feeds, video creation tools, more experiments, and more reporting. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liason, said on Twitter, “you likely saw account-level negative keywords started rolling out next month for brand suitability & other purposes.”

Here is what is coming soon from Google Ads:

• Campaign-level brand exclusions for branded queries on Google Search and Google Shopping inventory. Campaign-level brand exclusions will apply to most misspellings and brand searches in a foreign language.
• Page feed support in Performance Max will help you send Search traffic to a specific set of landing page URLs on your site.
• Experiments to test how Performance Max can drive incremental conversions and conversion value. You can test the impact of adding a Performance Max campaign to your current mix or test Performance Max versus Standard Shopping campaigns targeting the same products.
• Asset group-level reporting will soon include conversion value, cost and other metrics.
• Budget pacing insights on the Insights page will surface opportunities to optimize your budget allocations, including where you could shift budgets between campaigns to get more conversions.

Nicole Farley does a deeper dive on Search Engine Land of these changes.

Here is a screenshot of the way to exclude brand terms from Performance Max campaigns when it goes live:

Here is the full list of new features with more detailed explanations:

• Account-level negative keywords: Add negative keywords at the account level to help you maintain brand suitability and exclude traffic you don’t want to reach. You can also use them to exclude queries for other brands’ terms if you have a specific agreement with them. These account-level negative keywords apply to all your campaigns that serve on Search and Shopping inventory, except Discovery campaigns. This includes your Performance Max campaigns to make adding negative keywords easier without applying them to individual campaigns.
• Campaign-level brand exclusions: Control which brands your campaign matches to—including your brand—with campaign-level brand exclusions coming soon. Brand exclusions apply to Search and Shopping traffic in Performance Max. You can apply different exclusions for each Performance Max campaign or use shared lists across multiple Performance Max campaigns. You’ll be able to find brand names in the UI and add them to the exclusion list.
• Page feeds: In the coming months, you can upload a feed of page URLs to refine your results using the final URL expansion feature. When final URL expansion is ON, this additional feed helps inform and guide Google’s AI to understand that these URLs are important (but does not restrict its matching to them). With final URL expansion OFF, page feeds make it easier to add more specific URLs to your Performance Max campaign at scale and to restrict matching to just these URLs.
• Experiments: Use experiments to see how adding a new Performance Max campaign to your current campaign mix drives additional conversions or conversion value. You can also use experiments to test a Standard Shopping campaign head-to-head against a Performance Max campaign to see how your results may improve and whether you should replace the Standard Shopping campaign. If you’re running other comparable performance campaigns beyond Standard Shopping (e.g. Display, Video or Discovery campaigns) that have similar settings and optimize for the same conversions, you can also add these to your experiment. This allows you to measure the true incrementality of using Performance Max.
• Video creation tool: Use the video creation tool in the Assets section of the Performance Max campaign workflow to easily create high-quality video assets (the tool was previously only available in the asset library). You can preview the video before you upload it to YouTube and start using it in your campaign.
• Asset group reporting: Soon, you will be able to see conversions, conversion value, cost, and a variety of other metrics at the asset group level.
• Budget pacing insights: Budget pacing insights will roll out in the next few weeks and help you automatically uncover opportunities to optimize your budget and performance. See how much your campaigns have spent and are projected to spend, along with your current and forecasted conversion performance. Understand at a glance how your campaign is pacing and whether there’s an opportunity to change or re-distribute your budget to drive more conversions. In addition, get customized recommendations to maximize your budget utilization.

Forum discussion at Twitter.