Performance Max hands Google your budget and asks for trust. Sometimes it earns it and sometimes it quietly spends your money on brand searches you would have won for free, then reports them as conversions. The job is to keep the reach while restoring as much control as the format allows.
How I run PMax properly
- Feed quality first for retail, since the product feed drives most of the outcome
- Asset group structure by theme or margin, never one group for everything
- Brand exclusions so PMax stops taking credit for demand you already own
- Audience signals used as direction, with the data to judge whether they helped
- Search-term and placement reporting mined for the visibility Google does provide
- Held against standard Search and Shopping in a fair comparison, not judged alone
My working position: PMax deserves a role in most accounts, rarely the whole account. When it is the only campaign type running, you have outsourced strategy to an algorithm optimising for its own definition of success.