Performance Max is taking credit for sales you'd get anyway
PMax looks brilliant in the first month for a reason. Here's how to see what it's really doing — and stop paying for your own brand searches.
Performance Max often launches with an impressive ROAS. Part of that is real. Part of it is that PMax is allowed to serve on searches for your own brand name — people who already know you and were going to buy.
Those sales are cheap and easy to win, so they make the campaign look great. But they are not new demand. If your brand campaign was already catching those searches, you've just moved the same sales into a different column and paid a little more for them.
What we do on every PMax setup
- Add brand exclusions to the PMax campaign, so brand searches go to a dedicated brand Search campaign with its own budget and target.
- Check the search terms insights for brand and competitor terms after the first two weeks.
- Turn on the new customer acquisition goal where the business case supports it — bidding higher for first-time buyers, using customer lists to tell Google who's already a customer.
- Split asset groups by product theme or margin, not by 'everything in one'.
How to tell if it's working
Look beyond PMax's own reported ROAS. Watch total business revenue, the share of new versus returning customers, and what happened to your brand Search campaign when PMax launched. If brand Search volume dropped by roughly the amount PMax 'gained', the gain isn't real.
PMax is a strong tool, but it reports in its own favour. Judge it by what changed in the whole account, not inside the campaign.
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