What is the best method to exclude a product from PMax shopping?
Hello!
What is the best way to remove a product from a PMax Shopping campaign without affecting or disrupting the feed?
1. Pause it from Merchant Center
2. Add the product that you want to exclude from the Pmax Shopping in the “Listing Groups” section under “Add subdivision” and then exclude it while keeping the rest of the products active.I believe the first option is the best because if you directly remove a product from the feed and add it just to exclude it, it might disrupt the feed itself.
Looking forward to your opinions. Thank you!
The short answer is:
Option 2, adding the product to a listing group subdivision and then excluding it, is the best method to remove a product from a Performance Max (PMax) Shopping campaign without disrupting your core Merchant Center feed.
Pausing the product in Merchant Center (Option 1) is generally meant for out-of-stock or temporary removal from all ads and free listings, and it can be a temporary solution only up to 14 days if using the pause attribute.
Excluding it via the listing groups within Google Ads is the direct, intended, and non-disruptive way to manage product inclusion on a campaign-by-campaign basis.
The long answer is:
Your intuition is sound regarding keeping the feed intact, but option 2 is the correct administrative way to achieve your goal within the Google Ads platform itself.
When you use the listing groups in your PMax campaign’s asset group, you are essentially creating filters for your product data within the campaign interface.
You would subdivide the All products listing group using an attribute like item_id, single out the product you want to exclude, and then select Exclude for that specific subdivision.
The rest of the products remain active and unaffected in the All products or other subdivided groups.
This is a far more flexible and less disruptive approach than using the Merchant Center pause feature, which applies to all Google Shopping ads for that product.
Using the pause attribute in the feed is intended for temporary outages and isn’t the recommended method for permanent or strategic campaign-level exclusion.
The feed itself, which is the source of truth, remains unchanged and available for other campaign types or Google surfaces.
An excellent and cheap solution for automating and managing this at scale is to leverage the Google Ads API, Google Tag Manager (GTM), and a server-side tagging solution like Stape or your own Google Cloud Platform (GCP) implementation.
The core issue with manual exclusion via listing groups is that it becomes unmanageable for large catalogs or frequent inventory changes.
By using the Google Ads API, you can programmatically manage your PMax campaign’s listing groups.
For example, you can maintain a simple internal spreadsheet or database of products you want to exclude based on business rules (e.g., low-margin, poor-performing, out-of-stock for a prolonged period).
A custom script can then use the Google Ads API to automatically update the PMax campaign’s product exclusions in the listing groups, effectively performing option 2 in an automated way.
GTM and Stape or GCP fit into a more advanced, related use case.
While not directly for product exclusion, they are key for conversion exclusion and optimization.
For instance, if you track a low-quality conversion event like a micro-conversion, you could use server-side GTM with Stape to selectively exclude these low-value events from being sent to Google Ads as a Standard Event or even use the Google Ads API to submit Conversion Adjustments (retractions) for orders that are later cancelled or returned.
This ensures that the automated bidding of PMax doesn’t learn from bad data, which is an equally important, non-disruptive optimization strategy.
The overall cost for this API-based automation can be very low, often just the minimal computing cost of running the script on a service like GCP Cloud Functions, making it highly scalable and cheap compared to the cost of a full feed management tool.
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