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Why is PMax the standard campaign type used by all advertisers nowadays?
Posted by on February 17, 2026 at 2:04 pmFrom what I've seen on different accounts, most performance marketers just run PMax campaigns for their clients, regardless of the industry/niche. They don't take into account the type of product/service and the intent behind it.
My question is, why is that?
Let's say you have a product/service with high purchase intent, that consumers wouldn't just impulsively buy when stumbling upon an ad. Let's say you have a company with an e-shop that sells tennis rackets.
Now obviously, only people interested in playing tennis would buy a tennis racket, and because they already have the need, they are pros or just started playing tennis and want to become the next Federer; thus it's a high intent product.
Most advertisers I know would run a PMax campaign for tennis rackets, for this tennis racket e-shop.
From my understanding, PMax randomly shows your ads in all placements, including low-intent ones like Display ads on partner sites, gmail ads, youtube, whatever, and you can't control it.
Is my understanding of it wrong? Otherwise why would you then waste money on low-intent placements, when you could run Search/Shopping instead?
You could counter-argue saying that a feed-only PMax can be created; but then I ask, why run that instead of standard shopping, does it have any advantages? Why doesn't Google just phase out Shopping campaigns then, and just create different types of PMax? A PMax for Search, one for Shopping, etc.
I hope you understand my dilemma here; if PMax has both low-intent and high-intent placements and ads, why do advertisers use PMax for high-intent products when money will be wasted? I get it for low-intent, it seems to be befitting that purpose well. But again, most advertisers I've seen run it for everything, thoughtlessly.
The only solution I can think of is that my understanding of PMax is wrong and you can indeed control placements and other variables, and that PMax indeed has advantages over classical campaigns due to AI and machine learning and whatnot. But then, why do classical campaigns exist anymore and aren't phased out?
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1 Reply
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If you have a search campaign that performs well, and brings at least 50 conversions per month (ideally at least 90) then using pmax on top of that can double your revenue from Google. It really comes down to the conversion data it has and of course the basics like you creatives, headlines, and landing page. But if that’s all good, then using PMAX is really great way to increase your revenue.
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The more I move my accounts away from Pmax, the better they do!
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Your understanding is mostly right… PMax does spray budget across low intent placements and most advertisers use it thoughtlessly because Google pushes it hard and lazy account management is the industry standard unfortunately.
The real answer IMO in 2026 is neither PMax nor Standard Shopping alone… it’s a hybrid where Standard Shopping wins high intent auctions through better Ad Rank control while PMax handles discovery and retargeting across YouTube and Display. Google actually changed priority rules in late 2024 so now whichever campaign has higher Ad Rank wins the auction instead of PMax automatically dominating.
For ecom clients I manage this hybrid setup consistently… one client spending $180K+ on Google saw ROAS jump from 2.3x to 3.6x after splitting Standard Shopping for proven bestsellers and isolating PMax purely for new product discovery and retargeting.
Standard Shopping campaign captured high intent searches at lower CPCs while PMAX found incremental revenue from audiences who weren’t actively searching yet.
For your tennis racket example Standard Shopping with tight negative keywords is probably cleaner… PMax needs 30-50 conversions monthly minimum to actually optimize properly otherwise it’s just burning budget while the algorithm figures itself out.
Most people running PMax on low volume accounts are basically paying Google tuition fees while getting mediocre results.
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Pmax is a great if you have moderate to high volume good quality conversion data. If you don’t, it can be terrible.
Several conversions per day for ecommerce. It has a clear signal to optimize and should do well.
If you’re running low-volume high-value lead generation it generally doesn’t work well (e.g. B2B client gets maybe 5-10 form fills per month, only 1-2 are actual SQLs).
Even worse is soft-conversion engagement campaigns. Client doesn’t directly sell anything online, just looking to get people engaging with their site (e.g. newsletter signups, PDF spec sheet downloads, website dwell time/page engagement). The legion of bots on the display network will fire an endless stream of junk conversion data back into the algorithm by triggering soft conversions and you’ll find your placements report littered with spam websites and apps with insanely high CTR and conversion rates.
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Pmax is like standard campaigns with training wheels. It’s accessible, it’s low effort, it’s safe.
Provided you give it the right target and guardrails, it will reach the low hanging fruits first: Brand search, transactional queries, shopping placements, retargeting engaged users.
As you increase your spend and run out of bottom of funnel opportunities, it will start expanding to top funnel awareness and consideration segments, and that’s when you’ll see random placements and low engagement
Advertisers you’ve seen running it dont even come close to have enough budget to fully cover the bottom layer, yet alone a full-funnel strategy, so it’s fine for small businesses with small goals, or advertisers not experienced enough to run the full acquisition pipeline themselves.
You wouldn’t join the big leagues with training wheels though.
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Because a lot of marketers are lazy haha
I always start with search campaigns to capture the highest intent searcher out there and if these campaigns aren’t working properly or there isn’t a load of volume on the keywords only then I test with pmax campaigns.
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Having reviewed about 100 accounts over the past year…
Your understanding is wrong in terms of what “most” performance marketers are doing with Google Ads.
Lead Gen:
Most, I’d say 80%+ are primarily using search campaigns for lead generation. I’d say only about 30% are including P-Max on top of search. And I’d say <10% are running a P-Max only strategy. Obviously in larger accounts there’s a much higher probability for a variety of campaigns with different goals including TOF, remarketing, etc.
e-Commerce:
About 90% are using P-Max in their account. About 70% are using P-Max for the majority of spend. I’d say only 30% are only using P-Max without additional standard shopping or search or DGen/remarketing of some kind.
There are also others outside of these categories, such as somebody offering online subscriptions, e.g. SaaS. Usually the setup is pretty similar to the Lead Gen model above.
P-Max and how it works
P-Max will spread out budget to maximize overall return in the campaign and across your account. Sometimes very little is spent outside of search/shopping, and other times the majority could be spent on video or display. And it can swing back and forth. For mid-size accounts ($10K-25K) P-Max is a great option because it’ll boost overall account performance on auto-pilot… not saying it doesn’t need monitoring/optimization… just that you don’t need to worry about optimizing spend across multiple campaigns.
In small accounts it often flames out due to lack of robust conversion data.
In large accounts it can often make more sense to nix P-Max and have dedicated campaigns for the upper, mid, and lower funnel. Or at least invest less. This gives you greater control over targeting/spending per channel/goal.
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PMax is great at chasing warm traffic or the easiest conversion across Google’s ecosystem. I personally think it’s a terrible campaign type for lead gen and new customer acquisition.
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That line about wasting money on low intent placements is where it gets interesting.
If you’re selling something people actively search for, spray and pray placements can feel like dilution. But a lot of accounts judge PMax off blended ROAS without really looking at what it’s incrementally doing.
Are they actually measuring lift against existing Search and Shopping, or just looking at the overall return and calling it good or bad?
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PMAX has several advantages, but it is still not intended to work independently of other campaigns.
Also, PMAX are super low funnel so if your account matches such criteria, then PMAX will work wonders regardless of the reality of the rest of the funnel.
The rule of thumb is that: if you have the data points/signals, then allocate a larger portion of the budget to PMAX Campaigns.
Hope it helps
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Maybe you have just seen a bad batch of ad accounts. A lot run people because it is easy, and a lazy way to run the ad account. Too many set and forget it and clients don’t review what is going on enough or demand better work from whoever is running the ad account.
You can run PMax Feed Only, that way most of your ad spend (90%+) goes towards SERP and and shopping ads. Most of our client accounts run a mix of PMax, search, standard shopping and even some Demand Gen and YouTube when it makes sense. No ad account should just run one campaign type.
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Most accounts we audit in the UK aren’t defaulting to PMAX.
We audit 5-10 accounts per month, for Lead Gen I’d say the majority put the bulk of their budget into Search.
For Ecom PMAX is everywhere, and most accounts are running PMAX without excluding brand, so the ROAS/Conversion volume is massively skewed.
PMAX does have some benefits over Standard Shopping I.E access to more bid strategies (Target CPA & Maximize Conversion Value).
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PMAX + search is the key
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“Do you not want the maximum performance? Are you stupid?” – Google
Honestly, their priority for 10 years now has been selling their low-value ad inventory, and PMax – while having its uses, to be fair – is just another way to do so.
Meta does the same thing with “Advantage Plus”, like could you name a feature any more desperately…
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As much as I hate it, it sadly works really well for ecommerce, and remarketing for lead gen. Can’t get other non search campaign types to bring in actual lead conversions.
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