The client is a major South African provider of consumer financial services, generating website leads through SEO, paid search, and Performance Max.
The client is a major provider of financial services to consumers in South Africa. Most website leads are acquired via SEO, paid search and now Performance Max.
Performance Max (PMax) presents a familiar dilemma: it cannibalises both paid search and remarketing campaigns, and roughly 90% of the leads it generates are low quality. Switching it off entirely is not straightforward either - would the 10% of valuable leads it produces have been captured by search or remarketing instead? The case for running it depends on the answer.
We identified ways to limit PMax's exposure to low-quality traffic without switching it off. This required two phases, as Google Ads released meaningful new control features for PMax throughout Q1 and Q2 2025.
Prior to Q3 2024, we had already excluded the client's branded terms and landing pages with low conversion rates from PMax.
Q3 and Q4 2024:
Excluded all landing pages likely to attract applicants with insufficient income
Excluded all app placements and "family-friendly" content categories
Worked with our Google representative to apply negative keywords from our paid search campaigns to PMax
Q1 and Q2 2025, as new PMax control features became available:
Applied the brand exclusion feature to prevent PMax from competing with our search campaigns on branded queries
Ran a script to audit all placements and YouTube channels used by the campaign, and excluded anything low-quality or off-target
Ran a script to extract PMax search terms, excluded the low-quality ones, and added the high-quality ones as exact-match keywords in our search campaigns to take direct control of that traffic
Over 9 months, the campaign became significantly more efficient:
Traffic from PMax dropped by 75%
Leads from PMax increased by 45%
The share of quality leads rose from 10% to 25%
The campaign was doing far more with far less traffic.
As of August 2025, we are gradually scaling the PMax campaign: increasing budget and raising the target CPL to reflect the improved quality lead ratio. A higher CPL target gives Google's algorithm more room to find the right leads, rather than optimising purely for volume at the lowest cost.