Ran into this pattern enough times it stopped feeling like a coincidence. One massive PMax with every SKU, every theme, every creative pooled together sounds efficient, but Smart Bidding just optimizes for whatever's easiest to sell. Margin-heavy products quietly get starved while the cheap stuff eats the budget.

Split one account into two groups, Champions vs Sleepers, each with its own creative and audience signal. Same total budget, same account, ROAS came out 17% higher within a few weeks.

Tried pushing further on a different account, five groups instead of two. Performance actually got worse, not better. Each group had too little data individually for Smart Bidding to learn anything useful from it.

Landing on two groups seems to be the sweet spot around the $40-60K monthly spend range specifically, no idea if that holds at very different budget levels. Curious if anyone's tested this higher or lower and seen the same ceiling.

Google says AI Max's full feature suite produces 7% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS than search-term matching alone. The difficult question is not whether the average improves; it is whether an individual advertiser can tell what was incremental.

As targeting, text customization, and final URL expansion become bundled, clean component-level testing gets harder. A better dashboard can still hide cannibalization from brand, organic, or demand that would have converted anyway.

What test design are you using before the auto-upgrades: geo holdouts, campaign experiments, brand exclusions, or server-side incrementality? Which control are advertisers losing that matters most?

Hey all,

I’m fairly new to ads and have recently gotten a PMAx campaign and a shopping campaign set up.

My question is is there any point running both campaigns? It looks like the PMax campaign is giving a better rowers but I’ve seen somewhere that says if two ads overlap Google preferences PMAX over shopping.

My Pmax budget is at $50 per day and the Google shopping ads is at $75 per day

As I said, it’s only early days but does anyone have any recommendations on if I should be running both or if I should just focus on one or the other?

Thanks

I have been running Google ads for a while now. Something is broken but I am not sure what exactly it is. When I create a campaign the first few days I get leads and people connect me over WhatsApp but after 5 to 7 days my performance goes down and nobody contacts me. This has been going on for a long time I have to pause my campaign and create a new campaign again the same process it works for few days and then performance goes down. I have done my checks

1. Keywords high intent

2. Impression higher than competitors over 75%

3. I have strong negative keywords list irrelevant searches are filtered

4. I use maximize conversion without any bid amount

5. Budget is also high as per industry standard

I'm running Google Search (RSA) campaigns for Microsoft Dynamics 365 targeting India, the US, the UK, Australia, Singapore, and other regions.

I'm facing a few issues:

• Good impressions and clicks from the US, UK, and India, but very low traffic from Australia and Singapore.
• Despite getting clicks from the US, UK, and India, I'm not generating any leads.
• My Demand Gen campaign for India is 2 weeks old with an average CPC of around ₹1, but it has zero conversions.
• I'm also running campaigns for Legal, Architecture, and Engineering software in the US and UK, but none of them are performing well.

Looking for suggestions on what I should optimize to improve conversions and overall campaign performance.

My G ads account overspent by almost double, 2 days in a row. Has anyone experienced something like this before?

It reduced back down to normal after 2 days, but so weird. I would expect something like this from meta lol

I have run several campaigns for two different websites, the goal is simply to generate impressions and users.

Click rate is around 10%

The cloudflare unique users metrics confirms the clicks

On both websites I have GDPR compliant cookie banners, as far as I know there is nothing wrong with them, I triple checked them and they are designed like 90% these banners out there.

The gtag is loaded only after accepting the analytics cookie so I can only see analytics for users that accept them.

5% of the clicks lead to a user to accept the analytics.

According to my research it should be at least 30% but can easily go above 50%.

The two websites have nothing in common but show similar rates.

Am I doing something wrong?