Google Ads Brand Lists

Key Takeaways

Brand lists are a feature in Google Ads that can give you some control on when your ads can appear in relation to specific search queries to certain brands. Now, you can use brand list as an inclusion or an exclusion feature, but there's some limitations depending on what campaign types you're using. So, we'll cover which campaign types can use brand lists and of course, how to set them up and get them added to your campaigns. First, we're going to start off by creating a few lists. And to find the brand list section, let's first head on over to tools, click on the shared library dropdown, and there we see brand lists. I'm just going to use a big popular brand that everyone's heard of just to make this plain and simple. So, I'm going to click on the blue plus button first. Add in my name. Okay. And then we're going to pretend like we want to create a list of all the Coca-Cola brands. So, as I click on the brand section, just going to paste in the name. And there we see some pretty relevant ones. So, I'm just going to click on all the ones that make sense. There's another brand. This is going to be up to you depending on the brands that you're going after, how big they are. There could be more options. We see some international options. Keep going here. Maybe I want this one. There's an arena. So, clearly a lot of sponsorships being involved here. I may want to go in and type in another one of their brands. This site looks like it makes sense. Okay. And then maybe one more. And yes, I did this one on purpose. That is a soda brand under the Coke umbrella. Now, it's quite possible that it's in here. But let's say we keep scrolling and scrolling and I don't see it anywhere. You can go down to request a brand. Here we go. We'd enter the brand name, choose the proper category, add in the URL, and then submit the request. There we see the warning at the top. Could take several weeks for the review to go through and only if it's approved, then it'll start showing up. So then you can go back into this specific list after it's saved. And edit the list. And it's easy enough to do. You can just click on the name of the list. It is a link. And here we can click on the pencil button, edit the name, add or remove any brands. Pretty simple. Okay, but let's head back to our brand list. Now, in certain cases, I will admit it's pretty rare. The brand list it's pulling from may not be exactly what you want. Just going to skip the name part and type in a brand here. Now, sometimes it's important to look at the URL underneath the brand. One, most importantly, to clarify that it's the right one. But if I open up a few other tabs, this is hersheyand.com. This is the URL showing up for the Hershey's brand in Google Ads. And while they do list brands within this website, this website is mainly focused on recipes, inspiration, brands isn't necessarily a priority because the main Hershey website is something totally different. The main Hershey company.com website is more focused on the brands. In this case for Hershey, it's probably so similar, it doesn't matter. But it's always good to be fully aware of which URL is being used that is associated with the brand, especially if there are a lot of brands and sister companies all within the same parent company. But heading back to Google Ads, I'm going to create a different one because we created our initial list from the Coke brands. Now, let's look at some competitors. You can probably see that we're going to use this from our exclusion list. And in this case, if you don't want to be associated at all with specific brands, you may be a lot more flexible on which ones you want to include. So, in this case, specifically, international ones. I don't care if they're local or not, whether it's a physical location or a brand. So, you might go through, check anything that mentions your competitors, and if you're that similar, make sure you're not checking your own brands, and start excluding certain things. I'm not going to check all of them. It's not worth the time. There's another one. One more. H. See, here's a perfect example. This is definitely a competitor brand, but look at the URL. Pretty weird, huh? That can happen. So, again, just be very careful with what you're adding, but you get the point. And in our case, we're just going to pretend that we want to use this list as an exclusion. So, I'm going to save it. And now we have a couple of lists here. Now, one thing I'll admit I don't know is how many lists you're able to create within an account. And all my current clients, we don't need a ton of lists. So, I don't have dozens or so created. I only have a couple per account. So, if you know the answer to that, let me know in the comments. I'm curious. So, now we can move on how to implement these lists within campaigns. But before we do, I want to talk about a few important things to know. And first, you can see we're going to start off with brand inclusions. When using brand inclusions in a campaign, your ads will only appear for queries associated with the brand list that you select. So essentially it's a campaign level setting. Now the second thing with inclusions include some changes over the past year. So brand lists have been around for a while and you used to be able to use them within all search campaigns. Well, starting in May of 2025, brand inclusions were only visible if you were using AI Max for search. If you previously were using brand lists in your search campaigns before May of 2025, you can still use them. You just can't edit or add any new brand lists unless you change it to turn on AIAX. kind of stinks, but that's the way it is right now. Now, as for exclusions, it's a little bit different. It's probably pretty obvious, but it works as the opposite of inclusions. Your campaign won't serve any ads for any of the queries associated with the brand list that you've added as an exclusion. And this setting is for search and performance max campaigns. That being said, let's go back into Google Ads and I'll show you how to implement brand inclusions and exclusions. Back on the brand list page, there are a few ways where you can add your brand lists as inclusions or exclusions. And you probably saw one of the first ways earlier when we were editing the list. So, I'm going to go back into one of the lists. And there it is down below. Under each list, you can choose to apply as an inclusion or an exclusion directly from the list. But if I click on inclusion, you see I have no options here. And normally enabled and pause campaigns would still show up. That is because none of the search campaigns in our demo account have AIAX enabled. But normally you would just select the campaigns, click apply, and you're done. Because as I mentioned earlier, it is a campaign level setting. Okay, since I can't do it, I'll have to go back to campaigns and then choose it the second way. So I'm going to pick a campaign, click on the gear icon, which is your campaign level settings. And we see this section here, AIAX for search campaigns. If I scroll down, this is the only section where the brand setting lives. Now, if I keep scrolling, there's no way I can turn it on in other settings or up above. So we are stuck with AIAX. If I try to click on brands, these fields for inclusions and exclusions are grayed out. It's telling me right here I have to turn on AIAX first. Do whatever you want from asset optimization. But now I can use my list for inclusions. And then here's the list for exclusions. Then I would save it. And then just for the sake of knowing, I'm going to go back into brand list. There we see that brands is included in one campaign and competitors, it's an exclusion in one campaign. And if you really want to double check, you can click on it and then see which campaign it's being used in. Okay, that's from the search side. Let me go back up to campaigns. Let's open up a draft. Let's find one of these performance max campaigns. So many drafts, so many videos. Let's go to campaign settings. Scrolling down to more settings. Remember in the slides for performance max, you can only use brand list for exclusions. So here's where I would come add in my exclusions. In this case, I am building a whole new campaign. So I would have to go through the process and launch it. But if you already have established performance max campaigns, you would do the same thing as I did with exclusions. Open up your campaign settings, find this brand exclusions section, add in your exclusions, and save it. Or you can go back to the brand lists and add them to your performance max campaigns there. And that's essentially it. But in the help article for brand list, Google answers some pretty important questions. One being, do brand list support multiple languages? for search with the new AI max settings. It definitely does because broad match will typically handle different spellings as well as translations. Another question they answer is about brand variance. Google admits it will capture certain things like Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola company because it has the same words within them, but what it won't capture automatically with just one brand where the different variants like Sprite. It's a completely different name. Even though Sprite lives on the main Coca-Cola website, the keywords and the search queries won't be the same. That's exactly why we had to search for an additional brand and also add it to the list. Pretty straightforward. Just keep in mind that if the other brand you want to add has a completely different name, you're going to have to add it to the list. Odds are it won't be captured within just one brand and one domain. So that's why it's important to request a new brand and submit it if you're not finding ones within the list. Cuz Google also says that there's a few things that define a brand. Different logos, different trademarks, the domain name. Even if it redirects to the parent company website, if it looks like a totally different entity, product names are different, whatever, it's its own brand, it will need its own line item within the list. And one last thing I didn't mention earlier, cuz it is technically a search campaign, dynamic search ads are allowed to use inclusions. But we all know Google is heavily pushing you to quote unquote upgrade your dynamic search ads to Performance Max. So, how long we'll have dynamic search ads, who knows? But if you are actively using them and still want to use brand list because you are casting a wider net, you are allowed to use them for both inclusions and exclusions. If you have any more questions about brand list and any possible setbacks that you may be running into, let us know in the comments. >> Thanks for watching our video. We really appreciate it. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up below. If you really liked it, maybe think about subscribing to the Paid Media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops. If you really really liked it, you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf, as well as looking at the super thanks button.