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Pmax Search Terms

Updated over 3 weeks ago

Performance Max search terms

Excluding keywords from your Performance Max campaign helps you control which searches trigger your ads, allowing for better budget allocation and more relevant placements for your shopping ads. By preventing ads from appearing in irrelevant search results, you can reduce wasted ad spend and target your ideal customer effectively. Negative keywords allows you to filter out search queries that are not related to your products which means each click is more likely to come from a potential customer.

Google has recently enabled the option to add negative keywords to your Performance Max campaigns. You can add up to 10,000 negative keywords on the campaign level. Some sidenotes:

  • Performance Max negative keywords are applicable to Search and Shopping inventory only.

  • Negative keyword lists aren’t available to use in your Performance Max campaigns.

Search term report

In our platform, within Pmax insights, navigate to the Pmax search terms overview.

The report provides data from the last 30 days and includes the following dimensions and metrics:

  • Search term

  • Impressions

  • Clicks

  • Conversions

  • Conversion value

Currently, cost data is not supported by Google’s API, which means that both cost and ROAS cannot be included in the report.

How to Add Negative Keywords in Google Ads for Performance Max Campaigns

  1. Open your Google Ads account and click on the Campaigns icon.

  2. In the left-hand menu, click on Audiences, keywords, and content to expand the section.

  3. Select Keywords and navigate to the Negative keywords tab.

  4. Click the plus (+) button to add new negative keywords.

  5. Choose your Performance Max campaign (Note: Negative keyword lists cannot be applied to Performance Max campaigns).

  6. Enter your negative keywords, adding one per line with the appropriate match type.

  7. You can add up to 10,000 negative keywords at the campaign level.

  8. Click Save to finalize your changes.

Which types of keywords to exclude:

  • Villain keywords: High number of clicks but few or no conversions.

  • Irrelevant keywords: Terms that don’t match your product offering (e.g. “cheap dress” if you sell high-end fashion).

  • Low-intent or low-quality keywords: Generic terms like “sale,” “coupon code,” “review,” or “trustworthy” that often attract low quaility traffic.

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