Mike Ryan has created one of the most detailed and easy-to-understand third-party reports on Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. It’s free and packed with valuable insights. Even Google’s Ginny Marvin responded to some of the concerns raised in the report.

While I won’t cover everything here, I’ve highlighted a few key takeaways below:

• Performance Max (PMax) cost share reached its highest point in May 2024, coming in just under 82%.
• PMax does deliver results—but not always in ways advertisers expect or prefer.
• Advertisers have become more demanding of PMax, and overall, it has kept up with those expectations.
• The average ROAS (return on ad spend) target for PMax campaigns has risen from around 4.7 to 6.0.
• In most cases, PMax meets or slightly exceeds the target, usually hitting between 95% and 116%, though there are exceptions.

This report is packed with useful information, and there’s really no way to do it full justice in a quick summary—definitely worth downloading and reading in detail.

Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison, also responded on X, saying:
“Congrats on the report–lots of valuable insights here! I wanted to follow up with a few clarifications:”

• There are no plans to remove Standard Shopping campaigns. In fact, Google is still adding new features to them—like the profit optimization beta. The idea is to give advertisers a consistent experience, especially for those using both Standard Shopping and Performance Max (PMax) together.
• If the same products appear in both PMax and Standard Shopping, they’ll compete based on Ad Rank, which factors in things like your bid. But this doesn’t mean you’re bidding against yourself. It just means the campaign with the better bid or target will win the spot. It won’t drive up your costs.
• The same goes for PMax and Demand Gen campaigns. If both are eligible to show an ad, Ad Rank will decide which one is more relevant. Again, they’re not bidding against each other, and in many cases, they can actually work well together. The key is to clearly define the goal for each campaign type.
• Tools like brand exclusions and lifecycle goals in PMax can also help guide the campaign to focus on getting more valuable conversions.

This was all shared in a forum discussion on X.