· Ecommerce
PMax is a budget line, not a strategy
Four guardrails we put on every Performance Max campaign.
Performance Max will spend whatever you give it, and it will report the result back to you in a way that makes the spend look justified. That is not dishonesty on Google's part — it is what happens when the campaign owns both the buying and the attribution.
So we treat it as a line item with rules, not as a strategy. Brand terms are excluded via the account-level negative list, so PMax cannot bill you for people already typing your name. The feed is segmented by margin tier with custom labels, and each tier gets its own campaign and its own target, because a 70%-margin product and a 12%-margin product are not the same business.
Third: asset groups are built around a theme, not around a product count. If you cannot say in a sentence what an asset group is about, the algorithm cannot either. Fourth: every quarter it gets a holdout. Two weeks off in matched geos tells you what PMax was worth, which is a different number from what PMax says it was worth.
None of this is anti-automation. It is the minimum needed to know what you bought.
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