5 Reasons Lead-Gen Advertisers Who Swore Off Performance Max Should Try It Again
Performance Max only optimizes for the leads you tell it are worth having, and most lead-gen advertisers never told it.
You saw that the call quality is poor. They are coming from the PMax campaign. None of the conversions that happened from this campaign were qualified. I didn’t see any qualified lead coming in from this campaign, neither from the calls nor from the form submissions.
1. Left to its defaults, Performance Max optimizes for the cheapest lead it can find, and cheap is rarely a lead worth having.
The majority of leads that we see here specifically from the forms are just unreachable. I know that PMax is actually very notorious for low quality, sometimes low quality leads. There is only that much we can do. So the call issue is really very serious.
(Creative is a different lever, and weak assets can sink a Performance Max account on their own: that gets its own breakdown.)
2. A new landing page will not fix it: lead quality is a byproduct of the traffic you are buying.
A new landing page can definitely help with some things, but not necessarily with the quality factor, which is a byproduct of the quality of traffic that we buy.
Google says as much about audience signals too: “Performance Max may show ads to relevant audiences outside of your signals if they have a strong likelihood of converting.”
3. A raw signal, like call duration or a form fill, does not tell you whether a lead is any good.
Optimizing the call quality is going to be our top priority because we were mostly optimizing for leads, but what we treated as leads were just calls of a certain duration. And based on what we see now in CallRail, it really doesn’t represent anything. It really doesn’t tell any story in terms of whether they’re good or not.
Any account that takes this seriously ends up asking the same question conversion tracking always asks: which outcomes actually count?
4. Tracking which leads actually qualify has to become the priority, with a system simple enough to keep proving it.
The most important priority for us is to make sure that there are self qualified leads coming in. I wanted to create this spreadsheet where you will be recording the self qualified leads that we see and then use the data from the CRM to add, let’s say like deal amount if they convert, for example, in the future. It’s going to be for the internal use, just to have a very simple end to end visibility of what is going on.
5. Fix what counts, and Google Ads finally shows you real business results.
So eventually, now actually you have a way to see the full impact of your efforts in Google Ads interface and how this effort translates into real business opportunities for the client.
Google Ads already gives you that lever: a primary conversion action feeds bidding, a secondary one is logged “for observation only… not for bidding.”
Feed it a real signal, then decide if Performance Max earns another chance.
Deciding, in writing, which leads count as good is the fix here. Judge Performance Max again only after that decision is actually feeding the account.
See how that fits into full-funnel Google Ads management, Performance Max structure and signal-feeding included.
Reach out to talk through your account specifically.
