It’s your first month as Head of Performance Marketing. Your brand has serious issues, and your CMO tells you to start showing good numbers. You decide to invest in Performance Max (PMax), and launch a flurry of PMax campaigns. The numbers coming in look great. You keep optimizing your channel mix reallocating budget towards what looks best. Your manager is satisfied. You’re showcasing impressive ROAS. You feel like a stellar Marketing leader. You start posting on LinkedIn that PMax is the future of Marketing. “Join or die”! And the best part is, you can’t believe how easy reaching such results was. Meanwhile, your brand is quietly dying, and the competition is leaving you in the dust. Then, you get fired. The worst part? You still have no idea why, because those numbers did look great!

The Reason Why PMax Was Originally Launched

The truth is that PMax is Google’s answer to what a lot of business leaders were asking. Performance Max campaigns were developed in response to business leaders’ demands for a more streamlined approach to digital advertising. Firstly, PMax simplifies the process of starting ad campaigns by automating much of the setup, reducing the complexity that often deters new advertisers. Secondly, it addresses the need for simplified marketing performance analysis and optimization by encapsulating campaign data in a “black box” approach. This means marketers are not overwhelmed with granular data but can trust the system to optimize for them. Lastly, PMax aims to deliver “impressive” results, often showcasing a high Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), which appeals to businesses looking for tangible, positive outcomes from their marketing investments. PMax is undoubtedly a great mainstream product, because it delivered exactly what the mainstream was asking for.

Bad Management Practices

Those requests, however, stem from a deeper issue: a lack of expertise in Performance Marketing, and a tendency for businesses to chase short-term results over sustainable, long-term success – which creates misaligned incentives. Many business leaders prioritize quick wins and impressive-looking metrics to report to stakeholders, rather than investing the time and effort required to tackle complex marketing challenges. This obsession with immediate, “good” numbers can undermine the foundational work needed to build strong, enduring brands. By focusing on instant gratification, businesses risk missing out on the strategic insights and robust optimization that come from a more hands-on, analytical, and nuanced approach to Performance Marketing.

The Evolution of PMax: From Marketer Demand to Widespread Skepticism

As time passed after PMax’s launch, a growing number of performance marketers started noticing serious flaws. The very nature of PMax’s AI-driven approach meant that advertisers had limited control, suffered from opaque reporting, and were misled by inflated performance metrics. Marketers increasingly realized that what looked like success in Google’s dashboard often wasn’t real business growth. ROAS was misleading, new customer acquisition was limited, and budget allocation was often inefficient.

By 2024, discontent had reached a tipping point. A growing number of performance marketers, eCommerce brands, and marketing agencies were openly criticizing PMax – and by then, the web was filled with case studies backing up these complaints with data. The most common complaints included:

• Lack of transparency: Marketers couldn’t see what was actually working, as search term data, audience targeting, and performance segmentation were hidden.

• Over-reliance on Google’s algorithm: The AI-driven model prioritized budget spending over real business outcomes, often targeting warm audiences instead of driving net new growth.

• Attribution nightmares: PMax would take credit for conversions that originated from other channels, inflating its performance and misleading marketers.

• Limited ability to exclude unwanted traffic: Advertisers had no way to block poor-quality traffic or exclude irrelevant demographics, devices, or keywords.

• Budget inefficiencies: The lack of transparency and control meant marketers struggled to optimize spend efficiently, particularly when scaling campaigns.

This collective frustration pushed Google to partially reconsider its approach, leading to a series of updates in 2025.

What’s Changing in 2025: Google’s Attempt to Address PMax’s Biggest Issues

The 2025 updates attempt to improve transparency, control, and reporting capabilities. Some of the most notable changes include:

• More Campaign Control:

  • Campaign-level negative keywords to block unwanted queries.

  • Demographic exclusions (e.g., exclude users aged 18-24 or 65+).

  • Device targeting, allowing advertisers to focus on mobile, desktop, or tablet users.

  • Brand exclusions for different ad formats in product feed campaigns.

  • “URL contains” rules to refine targeting within product feeds.

• Improved Reporting and Transparency:

  • Search themes usefulness indicator to measure the impact of manually provided search themes.

  • Search terms insights source column, distinguishing AI-suggested queries from user-defined themes.

  • Enhanced asset group reporting, including segmenting performance by time, device, and more.

  • Ability to download asset group performance data for external analysis.

• Better Customer Acquisition Tracking:

  • A new customer acquisition goal with high-value mode, helping advertisers prioritize high-value new customers.

  • Campaign-level reporting on new vs. returning customers, providing clearer insights into customer acquisition.

These updates mark a significant shift in how Google is positioning PMax. While it still heavily relies on AI, these added controls show that Google acknowledges the product’s previous limitations and is attempting to restore some level of advertiser autonomy.

What These Updates Fix – And What They Don’t

What’s Better:

• Advertisers finally have more control over budget allocation, targeting, and exclusions.

• Greater visibility into search performance helps advertisers understand whether their campaigns are being optimized effectively.

• High-value new customer targeting makes PMax a more viable option for brands focused on growth rather than just retargeting existing audiences.

What’s Still Problematic:

• Google’s AI is still a “black box”: While reporting is improving, advertisers are still forced to trust AI-driven budget allocation and campaign optimization.

• Attribution remains murky: PMax still overclaims conversions, often taking credit for sales that may have originated from other marketing efforts.

• Budget inefficiencies still exist: Despite more controls, PMax still prioritizes spending over profitability, meaning marketers need external tools to measure true efficiency.

• Scaling remains challenging: Increasing budget allocations can still cause unexpected performance drops, making it hard to scale campaigns predictably.

How Modern Marketing Leaders Should Approach PMax in 2025

If you replicate what everyone else is doing, your results will by definition be average.

Savvy marketing leaders distinguish themselves from the mainstream not by blindly adopting PMax, but by leveraging its new features strategically while maintaining a skeptical and analytical approach. They challenge the numbers reported by Google’s ad platforms, scrutinize reporting insights, and use the latest transparency features to separate real performance from AI-optimized fluff.

These leaders work with a well-thought-out data strategy, integrating first-party data, external attribution models, and incrementality testing to uncover the real impact of PMax. They use negative keywords, demographic exclusions, and device targeting to refine audience reach. They monitor search themes usefulness indicators and search term insights to verify whether their campaigns are genuinely expanding their audience. By combining these insights with GeoLift experiments, Media Mix Modeling, and other measurement techniques, they avoid falling into the trap of relying solely on Google’s automated performance metrics.

At BlueAlpha, we specialize in helping marketing leaders make sense of their digital advertising efforts, including PMax campaigns. We empower you with reliable data and insights, ensuring your marketing decisions are driven by real business impact rather than algorithmic bias. Instead of being at the mercy of Google’s AI, our tools provide the clarity and precision needed to allocate your budgets more effectively and maximize true marketing efficiency.