Is PMax a YouTube Black Hole? How to Reclaim Your Google Ads Budget

✍️ The Story of the Shiny New Car (and the Wrong Destination)

Every modern advertiser knows the drill. We’re all in on Performance Max (PMax). Why? Because PMax campaigns, powered by Google’s formidable AI, promise to be the turbocharged engine of our advertising strategy, often outperforming the classic, keyword-based Search campaigns. The promise is simple: more conversions, less fuss.

We start PMax, upload our best assets—and here’s where the story takes a turn.

⚠️  The PMax Paradox: Video Star, Conversion Flop

If you’re like many advertisers, you quickly notice a worrying pattern. You check your budget, and a huge chunk of your carefully managed ad spend is being poured into one specific channel:

YouTube.

Wait, what? Your conversion goal is a form-fill, an e-commerce sale, or a booking. It’s not a YouTube video view. It feels like the AI has taken your shiny new PMax car and driven it straight to a party that isn’t your main business event.

This happens for a reason: PMax is designed to find volume across the entire Google network (Search, Display, Discover, Gmail, and YouTube).

YouTube, with its massive video inventory, offers the machine the most room to spend, especially if you don’t provide a full complement of high-quality video assets (which, let’s be honest, is a common hurdle)

✅ Great News: Two Paths to Take Back Control

The frustration is real, but you absolutely can guide the AI and tell it which neighborhoods to avoid. While PMax is restrictive, we have two ways to intervene, though one is far more reliable than the other.

📊 Step 1: Unmasking the Spend Split (The Placement Report)

Before you exclude anything, you need to see the evidence.

  1. Click the Campaigns tab.

  2. Navigate to Insights and Reports.

  3. Go to the Report Editor.

  4. Find and run the pre-built report called “Performance Max campaign placements”.

Crucial Insight: This report often only shows Impressions by placement, not Clicks or Conversions. This missing data is the reason why one control method is superior to the other.

High-Level Budget Split (The Channel Performance Report)

This report provides the immediate answer to “Where is my budget going?” by high-level channel (like Search, Display, YouTube, etc.).

  1. Click the Campaigns tab.

  2. Navigate to Insights and Reports (or sometimes just Statistiken und Berichte in the German interface).

  3. Select Channel Performance.

  4. Here, you can clearly see the split of your total spend across the major Google networks. If YouTube is taking a disproportionate share without delivering high conversion value, you have your primary evidence.

 

🛠️ Method 1 (Recommended): The Reliable Block via Content Suitability

This is the official, most reliable method to immediately stop PMax ads from running on entire domains (like YouTube) or specific channels across your account. This is a preemptive block.

  1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools and Settings icon (the wrench 🛠️) in the top right corner.

  2. Under “Shared Library,” select Content Suitability.

  3. On the left menu, click on Excluded Placements (under Advanced Settings).

  4. Select the option to apply exclusions at the Account Level.

  5. Use the URLs from your Placement Report (Step 1B) or enter the entire youtube.com/ youtube.de  domain to stop all YouTube inventory.

🤖 Method 2 (Advanced/High-Risk): The Automated Rule

As we have found, the interface allows you to set up an Automated Rule to pause placements and apply it at the campaign level.

  1. Click the Tools and Settings icon (the wrench 🛠️).

  2. Under “Bulk Actions,” select Rules.

  3. Click the plus icon to create a New Rule and choose Placement Rules.

  4. Set the Action (e.g., Pause Placements Network – Youtube).

Are you ready to secure your budget and focus your PMax campaign on high-value conversions?

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