The Case Against Performance Max in Paid Search: The Limitations That Make Control Crucial for Recognizable Brands

Google’s Performance Max (P Max) campaign type is a powerful tool that streamlines access to all of Google’s ad inventory using automation and machine learning to drive conversions. While it offers a broad reach and convenience, it’s crucial to note that it doesn’t always provide the level of control or transparency established brands require, with its focus on brand integrity and cost control. The ability to manage competing ad types such as paid search ads, shopping, service, or local pack ads becomes a critical factor for these brands.

This article focuses on when P Max is not a good fit for recognizable brand advertisers.

P Max may work effectively for some parts of an SEM strategy, but there are better fits for campaigns focusing on brand and brand-derivative keywords, where large brands already dominate the SEO space. Managing competing ad types such as paid search, shopping, service, or local pack ads becomes crucial for these brands. Depending on the industry, making strategic decisions between these ad formats is essential to ensuring that ad budgets are allocated where they will have the most impact, putting the power of SEM optimization in your hands.  Pmax does not allow for the type of control needed in these circumstances.

What Is Performance Max?

Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that allows advertisers to access all of Google’s ad channels through a single campaign. It leverages machine learning to determine where ads should appear (across search, display, YouTube, and shopping) based on the advertiser’s goals—lead generation, sales, or website traffic. While this sounds beneficial, it’s essential to be aware of the most considerable downside- the lack of control over critical aspects of your paid search strategy, including controlling messaging and goodwill, managing the consumer experience with your brand, blocking competitors, coordinating with affiliates and resellers, and controlling costs.

The Lack of Control in Performance Max

1. Managing Negative Keywords in Performance Max Comes With a Cost

Negative keywords are helpful to ensure that brand campaigns are targeted to the most relevant keywords.   Negative keywords are search queries that advertisers designate to suppress ads from showing on those keywords.

One use case is to prevent ads from showing on irrelevant keywords.  For example, with our brand, “The Search Monitor,” we use negative keywords to avoid searches targeted to “computer monitors” or “home monitoring solutions.”  

Another more modern use case is using negative keywords to temporarily pause ads to control costs, promote one ad type over the other, such as PLA ads instead of paid search, or drive traffic to free SEO listings when the advertiser is dominating the search results. 

Performance Max does allow the use of negative keywords; however, the negatives are then applied to every ad type across the entire platform. There is no way to control or direct negatives to just one ad type. While advertisers can use negative keywords with Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, specific limitations exist. Any keyword exclusions will affect all relevant ad formats in the Google Ad Inventory.

The challenge here is more control over which ad units the negative keywords apply. For instance, if you want to block a keyword only from text ads but keep it active for PLA, Performance Max doesn’t allow this granularity level. Once a keyword is excluded, it’s removed from all ad types, which limits precision in branded campaign management across different ad formats.

This restriction significantly impacts well-known brands that require more refined targeting to optimize performance, prevent wasted spending, and align search intent with specific ad types.

2. Limited Customization in Ad Serving

Performance Max runs on an opaque system that automatically determines ad placement and prioritization. This significant loss of control should raise concerns, as brands can’t tailor campaigns to target specific audiences or channels that provide the best ROI. This lack of customization can be particularly concerning for recognizable brands.

This loss of control is particularly concerning for a recognizable brand. Performance Max treats all inventory—search, Display, Shopping, and YouTube—as interchangeable, making it challenging to implement a channel-specific strategy catering to a brand’s needs.

3. Suppression of Paid and Shopping Ads

If you’re using Performance Max alongside other paid campaigns, such as Google Shopping, your shopping ads may be suppressed or show fewer impressions. Because P Max doesn’t offer insight into how ads are served, SEM teams often find their shopping ads cannibalized, resulting in a lower ad presence for high-performing products. This creates friction for brands that rely on Shopping campaigns for product visibility.

In addition, brand campaigns may get diluted across broader audiences that don’t align with specific business objectives, further hurting SEM performance.

Niche Use Cases for Performance Max

Despite its limitations, Performance Max can be a valuable tool in specific niche scenarios, offering unique insights for your digital marketing strategy. Understanding these potential benefits is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the SEM landscape, even if they don’t currently apply to your situation. It’s about being prepared and fully informed about all your options.

• Small Businesses or Startups: If you’re a small business without a well-developed paid search strategy, Performance Max can quickly get ads live across multiple channels without a deep investment in optimization. For instance, a local bakery looking to increase its online presence could benefit from the broad reach of P Max.
• Low-Brand Recognition: For businesses with little to no brand recognition, the platform’s automation can help discover new audiences and unlock previously untapped inventory.
• Simple E-Commerce Brands: Performance Max can work well for brands that rely heavily on automated product feeds and don’t require the detailed customization that more prominent brands often need to maintain control over ad spend.

While these use cases may benefit from Performance Max, it’s important to note that it’s not an ideal solution for established brands that prioritize precision and strategic execution in their SEM strategies. Performance Max may not provide the control and transparency needed to achieve these goals.

Why Established Brands Should Avoid Performance Max

Performance Max (P Max), Google’s AI-powered, goal-based ad campaign, may not be a good fit for established brands for several reasons. While it offers convenience and automation, established brands need more control and precision in search engine marketing (SEM) strategies. Here are the key elements that make Performance Max less suitable for these brands:

1. Lack of Control over Campaigns

Performance Max is built around automation, meaning advertisers relinquish control over critical elements like keyword targeting and bid adjustments. For recognizable brands, this lack of control is a significant disadvantage. Established brands often already have control of the SEO portion of the page on branded search terms coupled with high click-through rates.  In addition, there is usually low competition on some brand variations.  Brands in this power position on the SERP can benefit substantially from toggling how ad spend is allocated between various ad types, such as paid text vs. shopping ad units or temporary ad pauses, in favor of driving traffic to free SEO listings.  Pmax takes the control away from the brand on these precious (most valuable) keywords. Performance Max limits the ability to:

• Adjust bids manually based on the market landscape of branded keywords 
• Customize ads for different audience segments and search intent.
• Allocate budget dynamically based on performance across channels.

2. Limited Control Over Negative Keywords

While advertisers can use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant or low-intent traffic on specific keywords, advertisers can not target the negatives to turn off or on specific ad types.  This is problematic for large, recognizable brands that may want to pause certain ad types to drive traffic to less expensive or more effective ones, such as pausing paid text ads in favor of PLA or SEO traffic.  Negative keywords in Performance Max will turn off ALL ads across every channel.  This lack of control creates a problem for brands that want to be able to conduct incrementality testing across various ad types.  Incrementality testing is used to turn off ad type 1 to measure the effectiveness of ad type 2.  It is often done to test if free SEO traffic running alone can provide the same coverage as having both SEO and paid ads running simultaneously.  It helps large brand advertisers to measure the value of paid search.  Performance Max does not provide the flexibility needed to conduct incrementality testing, which is often done using negative keywords.

3. Transparency and Reporting Gaps

Performance Max operates as a “black box,” meaning advertisers have limited insight into how their budget is distributed across different channels (Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube). The automation optimizes based on Google’s machine learning but does not provide SEM teams with granular data to understand:

• Which channels are driving the best results?
• How are different keywords performing?
• What bidding strategies are most effective?

This lack of transparency makes it difficult for SEM teams to fine-tune their strategies or adjust campaigns to align with the brand’s objectives.

4. Brand Dilution and Ad Placement Risks

Performance Max’s automated ad placement across Google’s ecosystem—including Display, YouTube, and Discovery—can cause brand dilution. Ads may appear in places or contexts that don’t align with a brand’s premium image, leading to a loss of control over the brand’s positioning. This can weaken established brands’ carefully curated image and lead to lower-quality impressions or traffic.

5. Complexity of Brand Protection

Established brands must often protect their search terms from competitor bidding and affiliate abuse. Page coverage is essential to block competitors from siphoning clicks intended for you and to control messaging to consumers.   In the case of recognizable brands, your goodwill and messaging are often more important than optimization to metrics.  Performance Max loses this nuance, takes messaging control away from you, and potentially leaves it in the hands of competitors who may be implying negative or unwanted messaging and affiliates who may stray from sanctioned messaging. Performance Max is not designed to protect your messaging or brand goodwill.  It is designed to make advertising easy for small businesses that need more resources to manage multiple marketing channels.  This can lead to increased costs for branded terms, messaging inconsistency, a poor consumer experience, and reduced ad efficiency.

Our Recommendation for Complete Control:

Recognizable brands already have excellent SEO coverage on brand and brand plus keywords; therefore, they do not need Performance Max to help optimize ads because their brand reputation drives users to run searches and convert on those branded keywords.

We recommend using both PMax for generic terms and standard campaign types for brand and brand derivative keywords to control brand costs, protect from competitors and affiliates, and control the consumer experience.

Beware of Creating Conflict: If you decide to run both campaign types simultaneously, you need to ensure that Performance Max will not override your settings in standard campaigns.  Ask your Google rep for the optimal way to set up your account when you have both Performance Max and standard campaigns running.  You may need to use negative match in P Max to remove the keywords you want to manage in a standard campaign from pmax’s control.

Using Ad Armor from The Search Monitor to Identify Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are a powerful way to control your ad spending costs.  You can use negative keywords on exact match search queries to pause and unpause ads on keywords when competition is low, and you have significant SEO coverage. 

Brand Keywords with Significant SEO Coverage

Ad Armor from The Search Monitor drives traffic to free SEO listings while saving money on expensive text or placement ads. It works best for recognizable brands with significant SEO coverage. It identifies when brand keywords have low competition from competitors, arbitrage, and affiliates and informs if ads can be paused or unpaused. This gives advertisers more control over ad costs while preserving control over messaging.

Automating Incrementality Testing

Many large recognizable brands are actively engaged in incrementality testing, i.e., testing to determine if ads are paused and whether they will get the same or better results on a keyword with a strong SEO or PLA presence. To run this type of testing, an advertiser can not use Performance Max because it requires control over each ad type that may be present in the search results.

Ad Armor is an automated way to run incrementality testing. It detects when competition is low, and SEO, local ads, or shopping coverage is high. Based on your unique testing parameters, it produces a negative keyword list that is automatically implemented.

Here’s how Ad Armor stands out:

1. Full Control Over Ad Placement and Bidding

Keywords managed in standard campaigns allow recognizable brands to pause and unpause ads on one ad channel while running ads on other channels. This will enable brands to control costs and messaging and conduct incrementality testing.  

2. Leveraging Brand Authority

Brand owners often have substantial SEO coverage on their brand and brand-plus keywords, reducing the need for Performance Max to optimize ads for these terms. A well-established brand typically enjoys high organic visibility, driving users to search for their products or services directly. This inherent brand reputation attracts clicks and fosters conversions on branded keywords without additional ad spend. As a result, leveraging Performance Max for these keywords may lead to unnecessary costs without significantly improving performance, as the brand is already effectively capitalizing on its reputation to drive traffic.

3. Negative Keyword Management

Ad Armor provides precise negative keyword management, enabling brands to suppress expensive ads while continuing to run less expensive ad types. This feature allows for significant cost savings and better targeting accuracy, especially for brands wanting to dominate specific keyword segments.

4. Brand Protection

Protecting well-known brands’ reputations in paid search is paramount. Competitors and affiliates often bid on brand keywords to capture traffic, increasing costs and diluting brand value. Ad Armor works with The Search Monitor’s Brand Protection tools, enabling brands to monitor and enforce compliance with brand terms and take action against competitors or affiliates who bid on unauthorized keywords. This helps maintain the integrity of branded search results and ensures that competitors don’t siphon off valuable traffic.

Final Thoughts

Performance Max may seem like a convenient, all-in-one solution, but it’s often risky for brands that value control, optimization, and integrity. Its lack of transparency and customization limits SEM teams from executing finely tuned campaigns that maximize results and minimize wasted spend.  Performance Max relies on Google’s one-size-fits-all approach to ad distribution, but recognizable brands need customized strategies to optimize their search engine marketing (SEM) results.  For this reason, it is not recommended to use Performance Max for brand and brand derivative keywords for recognizable brands.  For campaign control, it is essential for brands to manage keywords in traditional campaigns, where bids and negative keywords can be controlled by ad type, and to be able to conduct incrementality testing to inform where to allocate ad dollars best. 

Tools like Ad Armor provide the needed support to control ad spending and automate incrementality testing across search marketing channels that frequently compete against each other on the same SERP: SEO, PLA, PPC, and Local.