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Pmax frustration
Posted by on August 31, 2025 at 11:08 pmReally getting tired of pmax. It was doing great as this is a monster time of year for me in sales. I have a $250 budget currently. This day last I spent $450 in a day on my old shopping campaign because of college football. So yesterday my budget got maxed out early and u could tell pmax slowed down in getting me traffic. I increased my budget yesterday from $250-$275 yesterday because how busy this time of year is but was told increase it slowly. now today…it only spent $129 so far and it’s 6:30!!! And I’m having a terrible day with it. Can anyone explain why it would drastically slow down a day after I increased my budget in a historically busy weekend for buying the stuff I sell after that change?
On a side note, I want it to be at $400 a day budget for the next 4 months and am slowly increasing it. Should I just make that big of a budget increase now?
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1 Reply
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You should not be making budget increases simply based off of perceived seasonal demand, Google will tell you if you’re limited by budget, and only then if you’re hitting your ROAS target should you listen..
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definitely dont increase it to $400 right away, any huge change will cause volatility. it could just be an off day, a 25$ increase from $250 shouldnt be enough to throw things off.
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PMax often under-spends right after a budget bump because even small changes can trigger re-learning and tighter pacing. If you want steady performance, raise 10–20% every few days, but for peak demand (like football weekends) it’s better to jump straight to $400 and let it restabilize. Expect 2–4 days of volatility before it smooths out.
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Just increasing the budget doesn’t mean Google is going to spend it. Your competitors could just be winning more ad auctions and thus getting the clicks. Just increase your budget by 20% every 5 – 7 days and monitor performance.
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I found that budget increases often take 1-2 days to spend with some level of accuracy. Also depending on the ROAS target you have set of course.
Example:
– No bid cap, max conversion value, you are consistently spending your daily budget (e.g. $250) every day. You set it to $350 -> chances are you are spending those $350 immediately
– ROAS Target of 400%, same scenario as above, it may take you 1-2 (or more) days to get there. Or, if the Target is TOO HIGH for the new daily budget, you might never spend it
Remember that a budget increase (while having a Target) means that Google has to recalibrate completely. Finding profitable customers at $250 a day is way easier than at $500 a day.
Plus, intraday scaling can be tough at small levels. For example, one is in golf and one in soccer (to keep things somewhat close to your case). With one we spend $2-2.5k on PMAX per day. Due to the large amount of conversions each day, intraday scaling works pretty well. Google has enough data to perform when we increase daily budgets to up to $4k on busy days.
The other brand is in a similar budget range as you are. Here we try to even out budgets over weeks. We don’t scale individual days. We are now roughly at $500-600/day trying to hit that $1-1.5k range asap, because I found this to be the threshold where intraday becomes more reliable.
Hope that makes sense, good luck!
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