Why You Should Use Brand Lists on Google Ads

Probably still a quite neglected feature in Google Ads, brand lists actually give advertisers the opportunity to optimise campaigns to avoid unwanted traffic and wasted money.

What Are Brand Lists in Google Ads?

Brand lists were released last year (2023) by Google and are simply lists of brands that allow advertisers to exclude brand terms from Performance Max campaigns.

Ever since Performance Max campaigns were introduced, advertisers have been eagerly asking Google for a way to include negative keywords.

Google responded with a promise to deliver something exciting.

And voilà! Brand Lists were born.

What's really cool is that Brand Lists aren't limited to just Performance Max campaigns. They can also be used as Brand restrictions to make sure your broad match keywords in Search campaigns focus on these brands

What Are the Benefits of Using Brand Lists?

• Streamlined Management: Brand lists provide a more efficient method for handling branded traffic compared to relying solely on negative keywords. By simply inputting the brand name, Google automatically recognises variations, misspellings, and translations. This simplifies the process, saving time and resources that would otherwise be spent on maintaining an extensive list of negative keywords.
  

• Enhanced Control Over Branded Searches: Brand lists offer two distinct settings that empower advertisers with greater control over how their ads are displayed for branded searches:
  

1. Brand Restrictions (for Search Campaigns): This feature ensures that ads are exclusively shown for searches containing the brand name or closely related variations and you can use the Brand restrictions setting to limit searches to the brands that you’ve provided in your list. This is particularly useful if you want to employ broad match keywords in your brand campaigns while restricting ad displays solely to queries relevant to your specific brand. Before these new brand controls, advertisers did not have a way to filter potentially matching search queries for their broad-match branded keywords. In fact, broad match keywords set for your brand would trigger ads for anything contextually similar to your brand name and its variations. Now, with Google Ads restrictions for brands in place, advertisers can rest assured that their branded keywords will only trigger ads for users actively seeking their business. There are some requirements to use this feature: The campaign must use a conversion or conversion value-based bidding strategy The campaign must have broad match keywords. If you’re not using broad match keywords and want to use Brand restrictions, you’ll have to convert all your keywords to broad match. This is quite a big change to perform, so think carefully about it!
   

2. Brand Exclusions (for Performance Max Campaigns): Up until now, the only way to exclude brand from pMax was either via a Google rep, or with a negative keyword hack (to be treated separately!). With Brand Exclusions, you can now enter brand names you don’t want your ads to show for in Performance Max campaigns. This functionality prevents ads from appearing in searches mentioning the advertiser's brand or competitor brands for specific branded queries on Search and Shopping inventory via PMax. It's a useful tool for minimising irrelevant clicks and mitigating competition with oneself for branded terms.

It's important to note, however, that while brand lists offer notable advantages, they may not be universally applicable. Instances where a brand name is exceptionally common or has numerous slang variations could potentially result in relevant searches being inadvertently excluded.

In summary, brand lists serve as a valuable asset for PPC professionals on Google, facilitating improved campaign efficiency and refined control over branded traffic, but it is a pretty new development. Time will if and how exactly this can be used