Performance Max is Google's black box. It works, until you need to know why it works, or where the budget is going. For a £2M/year ecommerce client, that opacity was costing them.

The problem with PMax

  • You can't see search terms cleanly
  • Brand and non-brand traffic get blended
  • Creative and placement control is minimal
  • It cannibalises your other campaigns and takes credit for it

What we replaced it with

A transparent structure we could actually steer:

  • Standard Shopping with priority bidding tiers
  • Search split into brand / non-brand / competitor
  • Demand Gen for upper-funnel, measured separately
  • Clean offline conversion uploads so ROAS reconciled to real revenue

The result after 90 days: ROAS climbed from 4.1× to 7.4×, and, more importantly, we could explain every pound.

Control beats convenience when there's real money on the line.