Google's push toward Performance Max has left a lot of advertisers wondering if traditional Search campaigns are becoming obsolete. They're not.
PMax excels at finding incremental reach across placements you wouldn't manually target — but it trades away granular control and clear attribution.
Our rule of thumb: keep branded and high-intent commercial terms in dedicated Search campaigns where you can control match type and negative keywords tightly, and let PMax compete for the broader, harder-to-predict inventory.
The accounts that scale best run both in parallel, with PMax excluded from cannibalizing the Search campaigns' core terms via careful negative list management.