Performance Max puts one campaign across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and gives you fewer levers inside it. Placements outside Search are where advertisers most often worry about automated traffic, and the familiar per-campaign controls don't all exist here. These are the ones that reach a Performance Max campaign, with their limits.
The controls that reach Performance Max
| Control | Where | What it covers | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| IP exclusions | Account level only: Admin → Account settings → IP exclusions | Every campaign in the account | 500 addresses per account |
| Placement exclusions | Account level, under Content suitability, or lists created in a manager account | Display, YouTube and Search partner placements in every campaign | 65,000 per account (20,000 at a time); manager accounts: 3 lists of up to 250,000 |
| Negative keywords | The campaign, or account-level negatives in Account settings | Search and Shopping inventory only | 1,000 account-level negatives per account |
| Brand exclusions | A brand list applied in the campaign's settings | Branded traffic: competitor, partner or your own brands | — |
| Inventory and sensitive content | Account level | Which YouTube, Display and video partner inventory you appear on | — |
Two details matter for placement exclusions. Leave off www. to cover a site's subdomains and pages: excluding example.com also excludes store.example.com, but excluding www.example.com doesn't, and subdomain coverage doesn't apply on Search partner sites. Each country domain also needs its own entry.
Sources: Google Ads Help, Exclude IP addresses, Exclude placements at the account level and How to use brand suitability features in Performance Max; the account-level IP limit is from the Google Ads API reference.
Why the IP list is tight here
On a Search campaign, an address can sit on the campaign's own list of 500 as well as the account list. Performance Max has only the account list, and its 500 slots are shared with every other campaign in the account. Spend them on stable sources, such as datacenter and bot-network addresses, rather than home and mobile addresses that change hands within days. Our guide to the Google Ads IP exclusion limits covers how to choose.
The control that matters most: what it learns from
Performance Max is built around your conversion goals. It finds more of whatever converted, across every channel it can reach. So a bot that fills in your form or adds to cart is more than a wasted click: counted as a conversion, it tells the campaign that this is the traffic you want. No exclusion list undoes that lesson once the conversion has been sent.
- Count outcomes, not raw events, where you can. Qualified leads or purchases teach the campaign better than every form submission. See our guide to fake leads from Google Ads.
- Watch store events. Bots that add to cart and start checkout produce the events a shopper does. See bot checkouts on Shopify.
- Exclude placements that only send traffic that never converts, at account level, so every campaign stops paying for them.
Google still filters invalid clicks
Google removes invalid clicks it catches before billing and credits some it finds later, in Performance Max as anywhere else. Our guide to invalid click refunds explains where to see both and how to ask for a review.
Where AdProtektor fits
- It sees every ad click. AdProtektor scores each visit that arrives from a Google Ads click, whatever the campaign type, so Performance Max traffic is checked like any other.
- It uses the one IP list that reaches Performance Max. Automated and returning sources, such as bots, datacenter and bot-network addresses and high-confidence threats, go on the account-level list, ranked by threat score. Campaign-level lists exist only for Search, Display and Shopping, so other sources go there.
- It keeps blocked visitors out of the learning. With ConversionOS and fraud protection on, a conversion from a visitor AdProtektor has blocked is withheld instead of being sent to Google Ads, Meta or GA4, and the dashboard records what was withheld.
- It supports a review request. The Google Ads Refund Report exports each flagged click with its GCLID.
Withholding doesn't certify every other conversion as a real customer. It removes the ones from visitors already blocked, which is the part of the lesson you can control from your own site.
An automated campaign is only as good as what you let it learn from.
To see what reaches your Performance Max campaigns, start a free trial and connect Google Ads with your Customer ID.