A household income exclusion setting has been spotted inside a Performance Max campaign, and Google has not announced it. Paid search specialist Thomas Eccel found the option in a live European account and posted it on LinkedIn. Search Engine Land wrote it up on 24 July. Nothing here is confirmed by Google, and nothing says the setting is appearing in every account.
What was spotted
The setting sits in campaign settings and lets an advertiser exclude users based on Google's estimated household income. The brackets listed in the sighting are:
- Top 10%
- 11-20%
- 21-30%
- 31-40%
- 41-50%
- Lower 50%
- Unknown household income
That last bucket is the one to think about hardest. It covers everyone Google could not classify, which in practice is whoever is browsing without a signed-in profile or a strong enough behavioural history. Excluding it is a much blunter action than excluding a specific income tier.
This is a level of audience control Performance Max has not previously offered at campaign level. Advertisers have been able to shape the campaign with audience signals, feed structure and negative keyword lists, but a hard demographic exclusion in the campaign settings is a different kind of lever, because a signal is a hint the system can ignore and an exclusion is not.
How much weight to put on a sighting
Not much, yet. This came from one person looking at one account, shared on LinkedIn and picked up by a trade publication. Google has published nothing, there is no support documentation to point at, and there is no stated eligibility rule. Features have appeared in accounts before and been pulled, or turned out to be a limited test rather than a rollout.
The useful response is to check your own account rather than to plan around a screenshot. If the setting is there, it is there. If it is not, no amount of restructuring will summon it.
What this means for Thai marketers
The sighting was in a European account. Nothing in the report says the setting is live in Thailand, and nothing says it is not. Google's household income targeting has never been uniformly available worldwide, so country availability is a real variable here and not a detail to assume either way. Anyone telling you it works in Thai accounts today is guessing unless they have opened the campaign settings and looked.
If it does reach Thai accounts, the advertisers who benefit most are the ones whose product simply does not fit half the market: private hospitals and premium clinics, luxury property, high-end automotive, private international schools, premium travel. These accounts spend real money teaching Smart Bidding to avoid people who will never convert, usually through negative keywords, landing page qualification and conversion value rules. A campaign-level income exclusion would do some of that work directly.
The caution runs the other way too. Every exclusion narrows the pool the automation learns from, and Performance Max is more sensitive to that than a keyword campaign because it is spending across several inventory types at once. Cutting the lower 50% plus unknown could remove a large share of addressable traffic before a single auction runs. On a Thai retail account where Google's income estimates are working from thinner behavioural data than in the US or Western Europe, that is a risk worth measuring rather than assuming.
The practical order of operations has not changed. Get conversion tracking and conversion values right first, because income exclusion is a filter and a filter cannot fix a campaign that is optimising toward the wrong action. That groundwork is the same whether you run Google Ads campaigns for lead generation or ecommerce catalogues, and it is what decides whether a new targeting control helps or just shrinks reach.
Common questions
Has Google announced household income exclusions for Performance Max?
No. The report is based on a setting spotted in a live account and shared publicly. There has been no formal announcement and no documentation.
Which income brackets were listed?
Top 10%, 11-20%, 21-30%, 31-40%, 41-50%, lower 50%, and unknown household income.
Is this available in Thailand?
Unknown. The sighting was in a European account, and availability of household income targeting has varied by country. Check your own campaign settings rather than relying on a report from another market.
Should I restructure my Performance Max campaigns now?
No. A setting that may or may not be in your account is not a reason to rebuild anything. If it does appear, treat it as a test with a control, not a global change applied to every campaign at once.
How is this different from an audience signal?
An audience signal tells the system who to look for. An exclusion tells it who to stop showing ads to. The second one removes inventory, which is why it needs more care.
Where this leaves advertisers
Performance Max has been criticised since launch for how little advertisers can steer it, and every added control gets attention for that reason. A household income exclusion, if it becomes generally available, would be one of the more consequential ones because it cuts audience rather than nudging it. For now it is a sighting in one European account, reported by one outlet, with no word from Google. Worth checking your own settings for. Not worth building a media plan on. If you want a second pair of eyes on how much control your Performance Max campaigns actually have today, that is a conversation worth having before the next feature lands.
