Performance Max is spending your budget on brand searches instead of new customers — here is how to fix the feed and the structure

Performance Max is the primary Google Shopping format in Australia and Google allocates more Shopping inventory to PMax campaigns than to Standard Shopping. Most Australian brands benefit from running PMax as their primary Shopping vehicle, with a Standard Shopping campaign running alongside it at a lower budget to surface search term data that PMax does not provide. The Standard Shopping campaign is not intended to compete with PMax on budget. Its purpose is intelligence: actual search queries, which PMax hides, that inform negative keyword strategy and title optimisation.

Google provides a brand exclusion feature within Performance Max that can be applied at the campaign level. Unlike standard negative keywords in a Search campaign, brand exclusions in PMax are applied via a brand list that you build using your brand name and common misspellings. Once applied, PMax will not trigger Shopping or Search ads on queries matching the brand exclusion list. This does not prevent your Brand Search campaign from continuing to serve on those queries. The exclusion needs to be reviewed after major product launches or brand name changes, as new brand-adjacent terms may not be covered automatically.

Yes. Afterpay annotations can appear on Google Shopping ads for Australian merchants who have Afterpay configured as a payment method on their site. The annotation is enabled through Google Merchant Centre's "buy on Google" or promotions feed, depending on account configuration, and displays the instalment amount (for example, "4 x $25") alongside the product price in Shopping results. Eligibility requires that the product price falls within Afterpay's minimum and maximum transaction limits and that Afterpay is a live payment option at checkout. The annotation does not require a separate ad format or additional creative.

Product group segmentation in PMax is done at the asset group level. You create separate asset groups within the same campaign and use listing group filters (product type, custom label, brand, or ID) to assign specific products to each asset group. Margin tiers are most easily implemented using custom labels in the product feed: you assign a custom label value (such as "high-margin" or "tier-1") to products in each margin band, then use that custom label as the listing group filter when building asset groups. Each asset group can then have its own ROAS target set via the campaign's asset group bidding settings, allowing the algorithm to bid appropriately for products with different margin profiles.

There is no universal ROAS target that applies across product categories or business models. The correct ROAS target for your Shopping campaign is derived from your gross margin and your acceptable cost-of-sale percentage. If a product has a 60% gross margin and you are willing to spend 20% of revenue on paid acquisition, the target ROAS is 5x. If the margin is 40% and the acceptable cost-of-sale is 25%, the target ROAS is 4x. Setting ROAS targets without reference to margin data produces campaigns that optimise for a metric rather than for profit. We calculate target ROAS by asset group as part of the campaign build, using the margin data you provide.