Running PMax is a bit like riding an elephant.
That’s not to say PMax doesn’t have a role. After all, an elephant can get you from A to B. How neatly, and how reliably it gets you there, is another matter…
The same goes for heavily automated Google Ads more broadly. PMax is the long-established posterchild, with AI Max its fast-growing younger sibling, now usurping DSA and set to become the default for Search. If you’re going to ride one of this family of beasts, it’s good to know what it is and how it behaves.
You’re not fully in control
You can influence an elephant with certain inputs: a tap here, a word there. It interprets those inputs and may decide to alter its course. That’s about as close as you get to driving it.
You feed PMax with inputs – ROAS targets, audience signals… and the campaign responds in ways that aren’t always traceable to a particular nudge. It processes signals you can’t see, and it won’t tell you what made it bear left.
Automated campaigns make decisions you couldn’t make, on signals you don’t have, at a speed you couldn’t match. That gives it some advantages, of course, but control isn’t one of them. You don’t have a steering wheel.
It also doesn’t turn on a sixpence. Material changes to a tCPA, a budget, or a feed can take hours to register and days to produce a new equilibrium. If you’ve made the wrong call, it may take a while to play out. You set a course, and you wait.
The rider matters
The same elephant behaves quite differently with a skilled rider versus a beginner.
And so it is with PMax. Two operators with the same product, the same budget, and the same campaign type can produce wildly different results. Knowing which signals the system takes seriously, when to hold a setting and when to step in, how great an impact a given tweak tends to have in practice – you won’t get most of this from Google’s help pages.
It’s very different work from running a standard Search campaign. You’re shaping the environment for the system, dangling carrots for it, and preparing its path. You’re not doing the walking.
An experienced operator will often intervene less than a beginner, and make lighter touch changes when they do.
If you can walk…
The elephant can get you to your destination… but it might not be the most efficient way to get there.
PMax needs time to learn, and time to settle. The feedback loop is slow, and wrong calls can be costly to put right.
A well-built Search campaign might get you the same outcome with a lot less fuss. You can see clearly what’s working and what isn’t, and you can chart a path precisely towards the former. The control is fairly direct, and the feedback is fast.
On many journeys – especially the ones where you already know the road – the simpler option is the better one.
Where the elephant earns its keep
For some journeys, an elephant is exactly what you want. Perhaps there’s more ground than you can cover on foot, or you’re traversing thick overgrowth through which the elephant can pick up paths you wouldn’t have spotted on your own.
And PMax can do work that a Search campaign can’t. It can scan for and track down conversions you wouldn’t have found going after one channel at a time. When buyers come from many directions and the system has enough signal to learn from, that breadth is genuine value.
Scale cuts both ways
The same big feet that take the elephant through difficult ground can flatten what’s underneath.
When it goes wrong, it can go badly wrong. A misconfigured conversion, an unwanted landing page expansion, failure to make an important exclusion – any of these can burn budget across PMax’s subchannels at a scary pace. The same automation that makes the breadth possible removes the friction that would have given you time to react.
And even when you do everything right, the journey isn’t guaranteed. Markets shift, auction dynamics change, and the system that worked beautifully last quarter doesn’t always do the same this quarter. Even skilled riders on familiar elephants can lose the path.
Not all elephants are alike
Smart Shopping is where PMax was always going to be at its best.
PMax without a feed – especially in lead gen – is a different beast: less predictable, harder to handle, and more work for the operator (like the long-ridden Asian elephant versus its bulkier African relative).
When the journey calls for it
Not every journey calls for an elephant. Some journeys do… it’s important to know which.
PMax, AI Max, and whatever else Google rolls out into the same family deserve to be chosen on their merits for the journey at hand. They’re powerful, slow to turn, capable of taking you to places nothing else can, and capable of going wrong in ways simpler modes of transport don’t risk.
Worth riding when you need one, better avoided when you don’t.
