What I changed in PMax — and why CPL fell 38%
Performance Max campaigns are easy to misread. The dashboard looks healthy — impressions up, conversions ticking — but pull back the curtain and you often find spend pooling in channels you never intended, audiences too broad to be useful, and creative assets doing very different things in very different placements.
This is a walkthrough of the changes I made for a mid-sized e-commerce client over Q1 2026, and how those changes drove CPL from R420 to R258 over eight weeks.
The asset-group problem
Most accounts I inherit have one or two asset groups stuffed with every product and every audience signal at once. Google loves this — it means maximum flexibility for the auction. You lose visibility into what's actually performing.
The first thing I did was split asset groups by intent tier: brand searches, competitor searches, and cold prospecting each got their own group. That alone let me see that 61% of spend was sitting in the prospecting group at a CPL nearly three times the brand group.
Audience signals aren't targeting
A common misconception: adding audience signals to PMax means you're targeting those people. You're not. You're giving Google a starting point. The algorithm will expand beyond those signals the moment it thinks it can do better.
- Customer lists (your actual buyers) are the strongest signal you can provide
- In-market audiences work best layered on top of customer lists, not instead of them
- Search themes added in early 2025 give you back some of the keyword-level control PMax removed
The exclusions that did the heavy lifting
Adding negative keywords to PMax still requires a workaround — you need to apply them at campaign level via a shared negative list in the account. Once I excluded the top 40 irrelevant search terms (identified from the Insights tab), wasted spend dropped immediately.
Brand exclusions from the Shopping sub-campaign within PMax also helped. If you're running a separate brand Search campaign, there's no reason PMax should be competing against it on your own name.
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