The short answer: if your Performance Max campaign looks too good to be true, check how much of its traffic is people searching for your brand. For a national supplements retailer I worked with, 85% of Performance Max traffic was brand searches: customers who already knew the brand and would likely have found it anyway. Removing brand terms from PMax and cleaning up keywords and negatives cut wasted spend by 17%, and overall revenue grew 20% in the first month.
The starting point: an account that looked fine
This wasn’t a broken account. It was performing fairly well, which is exactly why the problems had gone unnoticed. A full audit surfaced three things:
- Missed account settings that were quietly limiting performance.
- An outdated keyword structure with loose targeting and gaps in the negative keyword lists.
- A Performance Max campaign driving 85% brand traffic, cannibalizing organic demand instead of winning new customers.
Why brand traffic makes Performance Max look better than it is
Performance Max optimizes towards conversions wherever it can find them. Brand searches convert extremely well, because the person already wants you. So if you let it, PMax will happily spend a big share of its budget on your brand name, report a beautiful return on ad spend, and take credit for sales that your organic listing or a cheap brand Search campaign would have captured anyway.
On paper, the campaign is a star. In reality, you’re paying for customers you already had, and the budget that should be finding new ones is being used up.
What we changed
1. Removed brand terms from Performance Max. We excluded the brand from PMax so the campaign had to go out and find genuinely new customers. Brand searches were left to a dedicated, tightly controlled brand campaign and to organic search.
2. Rebuilt keywords and layered negatives. We refined the keyword structure and added layered negative keywords to stop spend on irrelevant and low-intent searches.
3. Fixed the missed settings surfaced in the audit, so the account was working with Google’s tools rather than against them.
The results
- 17% reduction in wasted spend from the negative keyword and Performance Max cleanup.
- 20% increase in overall revenue within month one.
- Growth in new customer acquisition through paid, now that budget was going to people who didn’t already know the brand.
- Organic search recapturing brand traffic that had previously been paid for.
How to check your own account
- Look at your Performance Max search term insights and see how much traffic comes from your brand name and its variations.
- Compare PMax results against a brand Search campaign. If PMax’s best “wins” are brand terms, you’re likely paying for demand you already own.
- Use brand exclusions for Performance Max and keep brand searches in their own campaign with a sensible budget.
- Review your negative keyword lists regularly, at least monthly, using actual search term reports rather than guesswork.
- Track new versus returning customers where your setup allows it, so you can see whether paid is genuinely growing the business.
The takeaway
A high ROAS isn’t the same as growth. If Performance Max is mostly selling to people already searching for you, cleaning it up can feel like a step backwards on the dashboard and still put more real revenue in the bank. That’s what happened here.