Unbranded Search Exclusion Audiences
Optimize Your Search Campaigns with Primer’s Exclusion Audiences
Enhance your Google Ads search campaigns by leveraging exclusion audiences to filter out irrelevant or low-intent traffic, such as non-buying job titles, small companies, or unrelated industries. Primer enables you to build and sync these audiences directly to Google Ads, helping you reduce cost per lead and improve overall lead quality.
For more info on the benefits, check out Primer’s Unbranded Search Exclusion Targeting use case.
How to Test the Impact of Exclusion Audiences:
Define an "anti-ICP", broad exclusion audience - e.g. filter everyone in the U.S. above or below a certain employee count to ensure the wrong people aren’t served your ads. Because each audience has a limit of 3M people you may need to split this across multiple audiences.
Establish search campaign metrics from the past two weeks as your benchmark.
Add the Primer exclusion audiences to your search campaign without changing any other campaign settings.
Check back in two weeks to compare the metrics and gauge the efficiency gains. This should be the cleanest way to test.
How to Add an Exclusion Audience to an Existing Search Campaign:
Follow these steps to exclude a specific audience from an existing search campaign:
Select the Campaign
Navigate to your list of campaigns.
Select the campaign you want to edit.
Access the Audiences Section
In the campaign’s settings menu, go to Audiences (found under the Audience, Keywords, and Content section).
Scroll down and click Edit Exclusion.
Choose the Exclusion Level
Specify whether you want to exclude the audience at the campaign or ad group level (if applicable).
Locate the campaign (or ad group) you want to edit.
Add Exclusion Audiences
You’ll see any existing exclusion audiences already applied.
To add more, enter the name of the audience you want to exclude in the search field.
Select the audiences you wish to exclude and click Save.
Monitor Performance
To gauge the impact of your exclusion audiences, compare campaign performance from the period before you applied the exclusions to the period after. This helps you confirm the effectiveness of your strategy.
How to Set Up a Google Campaign Experiment for Search Exclusions
Once you’ve built your exclusion audiences in Primer, the next step is to measure their impact on your Google Search campaigns. The cleanest way to do this is by setting up a campaign experiment in Google Ads. Here’s how:
Step 1: Create a New Experiment
In Google Ads, go to Campaigns → Experiments.
Click the big “+” button to create a new experiment.
Ignore Google’s recommended experiments — instead choose Custom.
Select Search as the campaign type.
Step 2: Define Your Base and Treatment Campaigns
Base Campaign: Your standard Search campaign with no exclusions applied.
Treatment Campaign: A duplicate of your base, but with your Primer exclusion audience(s) applied.
Name your campaigns clearly so you can keep track. For example:
Control = “Search – No Exclusions”
Treatment = “Search – With Exclusions”
Step 3: Apply the Exclusion Audience
Inside the treatment campaign, navigate to Audiences in the left-hand menu.
Open the Exclusions table.
Add your Primer exclusion audiences here (e.g., existing customers, competitors, job seekers).
Save your changes.
Step 4: Configure Experiment Settings
Go back to the top and click Schedule.
Set your Experiment Goals (most B2B teams focus on Conversion Value or Conversion Value / Cost).
Keep the split 50/50 between control and treatment.
Open Advanced Options and make sure to select Cookie-based split.
✅ Cookie-based ensures each user is stuck to one arm (control or treatment).
❌ Search-based splits assign at the query level, so the same user can fall into both groups — skewing results and artificially raising CPCs in the treatment.
More info: Google Help Article
Step 5: Double-Check Smart Bidding and Signals
If you’re using Smart Bidding or optimized targeting:
By default, Google auto-includes all Customer Match lists in your account as a bidding signal, even if they’re not explicitly applied.
This can contaminate your control, since it may still “know” about your exclusion audiences.
To avoid this: opt out of Customer Match as a Smart Bidding signal at the account level during tests.
More info: Google Help Article
Step 6: Launch and Monitor
Confirm you don’t have EU political ads selected (a compliance checkbox).
Click Create Experiment.
Your experiment will now run live. You can monitor results under Experiments to compare conversion value, CPC, and ROI between control and treatment.
Pro Tips
Avoid “Observation” mode: Always apply your exclusion audience as a true Exclusion at the campaign level, not just as an “Observation.”
Duration matters: Run your test long enough to collect statistically meaningful data (Google will show experiment confidence levels).
Expected results: Typically, exclusion campaigns show improved efficiency — fewer wasted clicks, higher conversion value per cost.
👉 By following this setup, you’ll get a clean, side-by-side read on how your exclusion audiences impact search performance.
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