Google Performance Max: what you can and can't control

Performance Max removed a lot of the manual control advertisers were used to, and the frustration is understandable: you can't see which placements are working, and the algorithm makes decisions that used to be yours. Some of that opacity is real. Some of the "black box" complaint is advertisers who stopped feeding it the inputs it still needs.

The levers that remain matter more than most accounts use them: asset group quality (Google explicitly weights how many high-quality creative variants you supply), audience signals as a starting hint rather than a hard target, and negative keyword lists at the account level, which Pmax now respects.

The most underused lever is conversion value accuracy: Pmax optimizes toward whatever value you tell it a conversion is worth, so if lead quality varies and you're not passing differentiated values back, the algorithm is optimizing toward volume, not toward the leads that actually close.

Pmax isn't a campaign type you turn on and walk away from. It's a campaign type that rewards better inputs more visibly than manual campaigns did, precisely because there's nowhere else for that quality to hide.