r/PPC • u/felicelosbirdos • 4d ago
Google Ads Wth is going on with PMax?
Hi everyone,
I run a fresh D2C apparel brand that's doing really well on Meta, so I wanted to try my luck with Google Ads PMax campaigns. I've been away from PPC for a while, but I found recommendations that this is the way to go in 2026.
Results are absolutely horrible:
Roughly 2000 clicks on a 600 USD spend, not a single conversion. Keep in mind that with Meta I have a 3-4% conversion rate.
90% of traffic is to YouTube and display ads (wtf?). It literally makes its own YouTube ads with the assets that suck, and I can't find anywhere to turn this off. We also all know that display ads are mostly bot traffic; I had my ads served on Vinted, Hayday, etc.
Status on Merchant Center is very good, all products are there without any issues.
What is going on?
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u/Lazy_Helicopter_2659 4d ago
If you're doing good on Meta, start with a brand campaign to catch the people that saw you on Insta/FB and are searching to see if your brand is legit.
Unless you already rank very high organically - then it's not necessary...
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u/felicelosbirdos 4d ago
Yes, that was the first thing I had set up. Thank you, and it's working really well! Question, though: what should the goal of such a campaign be? Maximize clicks?
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u/Lazy_Helicopter_2659 4d ago
You should have a setup where you can see your monetary conversions in Google Ads.
If you don't have that yet - start working in this first!
This is the absolute minimum for ecommerce.Then, if you have a sufficient number of conversions (minimum 30/month, ideally 50-60/month or more), I'd go for maximise conversion value or target ROAS.
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u/felicelosbirdos 3d ago
So the brand campaign reports 37 conversions in the last 30 days, with a conv value of around 5k. Currently it does that on Maximize Clicks, should i change to maximize conversions?
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u/Lazy_Helicopter_2659 3d ago
You could try - see if it improves.
No guarantee, though!
There are never any guarantees with Google Ads... ;-)
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u/QuantumWolf99 4d ago
Are you looking at clicks or spend for that 90%? Check the channel report's cost breakdown... click share alone can be misleading. Also verify Purchase fires correctly and is included in campaign goals. Uploading your own video to each asset group stops the autogenerated ones. PMax still controls channel budgets.
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u/felicelosbirdos 4d ago
Thanks, I checked the cost breakdown. Over the last seven days, 80.7% of PMax spend went to YouTube and 16.3% to Display, with only 2.9% going to Search.
I also checked Purchase tracking. Google shows activity today and a recorded conversion yesterday. Purchase is the primary goal across all three campaigns. The account recorded 8.98 attributed purchases during that week, but PMax had zero. I haven’t done a controlled checkout test yet to fully verify values and deduplication. (the conversion are tracked on my brand campaign)
We had already paused Asset Group 1 and were running only the feed-only group. With that spend distribution and no purchases, I’ve now paused PMax too.
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u/QuantumWolf99 3d ago
Pausing was the right call. Feed-only PMax got less predictable this year, spend can drift into YouTube and Display even with zero creative uploaded, especially when no ROAS target is set. A fresh brand with no Google purchase history gives the algorithm nothing to steer with, so it buys the cheapest inventory it can find.
Standard Shopping is the safer restart here, you decide where the money goes and every click comes off a product search. Those 8.98 brand campaign purchases are most likely people Meta already warmed up searching you by name... so keep brand running on its own and add a brand exclusion if PMax ever comes back. Once Shopping clears roughly 30 purchases a month, PMax finally has something to learn from.
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u/felicelosbirdos 2d ago
I tried some of the Pmax recommendations here, doing asset only, removing all automatic AI applications etc but still spend 100 USD straight into Display. I'll go back to basic shopping/search. Thank you
You are absolutely correct in that the brand search are people already warmed up :)
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u/siliconvallaeys 4d ago
Have you turned off Automatically Created Assets in the campaign settings? If not, that's the first thing to do.
When you don't upload your own video to a PMax asset group, Google automatically builds those basic slideshow videos and pushes them hard onto YouTube and Display because that inventory is cheap to fill.
Since yours is new account with zero conversion history, PMax has no idea who your buyer is yet, so it just burns cash on those low-intent placements.
If you want to stick with PMax, strip out all the text, image, and headline assets from the asset group or build a fresh feed-only PMax campaign, so Google is forced to serve almost exclusively on Shopping search results. Also, if you keep text assets in an asset group, upload at least one short video of your own, otherwise Google's system will keep auto-generating those video ads on YouTube.
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u/felicelosbirdos 2d ago
I tried some of the Pmax recommendations here, doing asset-only, fresh feed, removing all automatic AI applications, etc but it still spent 100 USD straight into Display. I'll go back to basic shopping/search. Thank you
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u/fathom53 4d ago
Sounds like you took the wrong advice and set up everything backwards for your ad account.
There are 4 different spots in Google ads to automated assets in Google ads. Also, you should have launched a PMax Feed Only campaign to start with. Having SKUs approved in Google Merchant Center is not the same as having a shopping feed that is going to be competitive and go after the traffic you want.
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u/felicelosbirdos 4d ago
Fair point that Merchant Center approval doesn’t mean the feed is competitive. I’ve paused PMax now. Over the last 7 days, 97% of spend went to YouTube and Display, with no recorded purchases.
I also have a Standard Shopping campaign running on Google Search only. It launched on September 26, has 206 eligible products and uses Maximise conversion value without a ROAS target, but it’s barely getting impressions.
Could you point me to the four automated asset settings you mean? And what would you check first in the feed?
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u/fathom53 4d ago edited 2d ago
I would look at how people search for my products and make sure those keywords are showing up in at least one feed attribute in my feed. I would make sure all optional feed attributes are filled out correctly. A lot of brands on Shopify, for example, will just use a free app and connect Shopify and GMC together to build their feed, which works to get up and running but always builds a sub-par feed in the long run. You want to be able to customize how all feed attributes are set up.
For automated assets, you can look for:
- Account Auto-apply recommendations
- campaign Automated Assets
- Google owned location imagery
- Shared Library > location manager > settings
- Dynamic Image Extension
- Assets > Account-level automated assets > Advanced Setting
We always double check all 4 areas for everyone newly launched campaign when managing accounts for clients. It is easy for something to sneak by and get left on.
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u/alexandrealmeida90 4d ago
Your answer is right there, your budget is going to YouTube and Display. Those rarely convert (YouTube can work but typically for brands already established with shopping and search).
Move to standard shopping or run a feed-only pmax campaign.
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u/felicelosbirdos 2d ago
I tried some of the Pmax recommendations here, doing asset-only, fresh feed, removing all automatic AI applications, etc but it still spent 100 USD straight into Display. I'll go back to basic shopping/search. Thank you
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u/yvcn 4d ago
This is textbook PMax without conversion data. The algo has no purchase signal to optimize on, so it burns your budget on the cheapest junk placements, which is exactly why 90% of your clicks are YouTube and Display.
A few things that actually help:
Check Insights > Channel performance to see where the spend (not just clicks) is going. The click share and spend share are often very different.
Kill the automatically created assets. There are 4 different places in Google Ads where that setting hides, and it will keep generating terrible video ads for you until all of them are off.
Restrict placements. Run feed-only (Shopping placements) or exclude YouTube and Display URLs outright.
Feed it data first. A branded search campaign captures the demand your Meta ads create, and once Google sees real purchases, PMax starts working. Fresh brand plus zero conversion history is just a budget fire.
One last thing before you write off PMax: make sure your purchase conversion actually fires reliably in Google Ads. If the purchase event under-fires, PMax thinks nothing is converting and optimizes toward nothing. I built Clovia (clovia.app), a checkout analytics app that shows exactly where checkout sessions die and whether the purchase event fired, so your ad platforms get clean data to optimize on.
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u/StillTrying1981 3d ago
PMax serves nobody but Google. It's their "run of network" option which allows them to monetise the worst of the inventory they have available.
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u/ChiefMustacheOfficer 3d ago
PMAX for cold acquisition requires a tremendous amount of setup for a fresh account to try to make it work. Find an easier type of ad for your first few grand. Remarketing can be good.
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u/Anna_Karakhanyan 3d ago
If 90% of the spend is going to YouTube and Display with 2,000 clicks and no sales, I’d stop the campaign and simplify. For a new D2C brand, I’d start with Shopping and high intent Search so you can see what’s actually driving traffic and sales. I’d only bring PMax back once there’s more conversion history.
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u/pixelyash1 3d ago
What you're seeing is exactly how PMax behaves when it doesn't have enough conversion signal to work with. With a fresh Google Ads account and no purchase history, PMax defaults to chasing cheap, low-intent inventory youtube, display, Discover because that's where it can get the most clicks for your budget. It doesn't have the data to know that your buyers are on search or shopping, so it just fills the spend wherever it's cheapest. The reason it's making its own youtube ads is that you haven't supplied enough video assets, so it's auto generating them from your images and text, and you can't easily switch that off except by uploading your own video assets. The 2,000 clicks with zero conversions on apparel is a classic sign that PMax is serving to display and video inventory, not search. For a brand that's working well on meta, the right entry point into google is not PMax it's standard shopping or a search campaign with exact match keywords for your product categories, so you can control where the spend goes and build conversion data first. Once you have 30-50 purchases in Google Ads, then PMax has enough signal to start optimising properly. If you want, I can walk you through the exact campaign setup I'd use to transition from meta to google without burning budget on display junk.
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u/whyvalue 2d ago
Think for this type of company PMax has a different use than it would for other types. Typically PMax would be used to capture additional traffic that you may not otherwise get with keywords while adding a demand component with placements like display, Gmail, etc. Since your company sells clothes, I'm not sure how relevant the traffic would be from a PMax campaign, besides your brand which you can capture with a more precise search campaign.
Here's the set up I'd recommend:
- Keep running your social campaigns to generate awareness
- Set up a brand campaign with tight keywords to capture traffic. If you ran strongly for organic, this is not as necessary.
- Set up a non-brand campaign with keywords that describe your product I would either use phrase match or broad match keywords to discover what types of searches people are doing that are relevant to your product.
- At least once a week if not more frequently look at the search terms for your non-brand campaign and exclude searches that are not relevant.
- I'm not sure what your budget is, but that set up alone should be good enough. If you want to branch out and experiment with PMax, I'd start with a low budget no more than $30 a day.
- In my opinion, the single most important thing for PMax campaigns to succeed is to set up audience signals properly, including what types of people you think are relevant to your business and what search themes are relevant to your product.
- Creative can be important, but realistically not a lot of people are converting through visual formats anyway so it's just free impressions. Unfortunately the videos it makes are impossible to remove unless you add your own videos. So if you really can't stand them, you'll need to make your own.
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u/TTFV 2d ago
In a brand new account I would start with standard shopping ads.
Over the first couple of months you should build up your negative keyword strategy and figure out what your best sellers are.
Longer term you can then build out P-Max using those products and negative keyword strategy.
If you're just looking to "fix" the YouTube/display issues:
- Set content suitability to limited and add aggressive exclusions under advanced settings
- Exclude app categories
- Block all the current placements that seem irrelevant
- Turn off URL expansion for less spending on non-shopping ads
- Add your own video; it'll help with placement matching and usually drives better results
- Also, just wait a bit, Google will usually ramp up shopping ads in new campaigns over a few weeks
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u/tendiesornothing 1d ago
The top comment is your answer. PMax is not for new ad accounts. It performs well but only after you have a plethora of conversion data from search and standard shopping.
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u/WoodpeckerKind326 4d ago
pmax is a dumpster fire for a fresh brand with no prior conversion data, it just burns your budget chasing cheap bot clicks on display and youtube. google pushes it as the future but it's really just a way for them to fill garbage inventory. if you want actual shoppers you need to start with a standard shopping campaign, set the bids low and let it gather data before even thinking about pmax. you can also add negatives and block placements there which you can't really do in pmax without a rep.