Why an audit comes before any optimisation

Performance Max promises a single campaign that allocates spend across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. In practice it is only as good as the inputs you give it: asset groups, audience signals, conversion values, and the listing data the system can pull from your feed. Before we change a single bid or budget in a new account we run a structured audit so we know which of those inputs is doing the work, and which is silently undermining it.

The fourteen points we always check

We start with conversion value mapping. If the account is still optimising on raw conversions rather than dynamic conversion value, we know the auction has been blind to margin from day one. Smart Bidding cannot make a tradeoff it does not see.

Next is asset group hygiene. We look for the classic anti-patterns: a single catch-all asset group covering the whole catalogue, missing video assets that force the system into auto-generated YouTube placements, and listing groups built without margin tiers. Splitting asset groups by margin band is, in our experience, the single highest-leverage change available in PMax.

We then audit audience signals. Most accounts hand the algorithm a generic in-market list and call it done. We rebuild signals around first-party customer match data segmented by lifetime value, plus the specific custom segments that match the buyer's research patterns. That is what gives PMax a meaningful prior to start from.

Brand exclusion coverage is the fourth pillar. Without account-level brand exclusions, PMax will cannibalise organic and direct traffic that would have closed without paid help. We file the brand exclusion form on every audit; the impact on incremental ROAS is consistently underestimated.

We check search themes for relevance and overlap with the existing search campaigns, negative keyword lists at the account level for blocking the obvious junk, and the final URL expansion setting which, left on by default, will cheerfully spend the budget on URLs you did not intend to advertise.

The last block is reporting. PMax exposes more than the standard UI shows if you query it via scripts. We pull placement reports, search term insights, and asset-level performance into a single sheet that lets us see, by channel and by creative, where the spend actually goes.

What the diagnostic produces

The output is a one-page document with three sections: things that are healthy, things that need a tune-up, and things that need a teardown. Each line item carries a rough effort estimate and an expected impact band. That is what the strategy meeting opens with — and it is what gets a client comfortable with the scope of work before we touch the account.

Why this works

The discipline is the point. Running the same checklist on every account means we never miss the boring fix that ships 18% of efficiency on its own, and we never start chasing a creative or audience theory while a tracking gap is silently lying to us about what is working. The audit is the foundation; everything else is iteration on top of it.