Most Google Ads Budgets Are Leaking Into Brand Searches They Already Owned. The 70-20-10 Fix Costs Nothing.
Performance Max bids aggressively on your own brand terms when you let it. Top advertisers split spend 70-20-10 across PMax, branded search and standard campaigns. Most Australian advertisers do neither and pay the gap.
The campaigns with the cleanest dashboards are often the ones quietly wasting the most money. The misallocation lives in the gap between what the platform reports and what the buying intent actually was.
Performance Max is bidding on your brand terms. The campaign is winning the auction at a price you would never accept if you were managing the keyword manually. Smart Bidding sees the conversion, charges the campaign for it and reports a healthy ROAS. Your branded search campaign starves of impressions, your CPCs creep up across the account, and nothing in the Google Ads interface tells you what is happening. This is the kind of misallocation that hides inside a campaign reporting strong numbers.
The mechanic is simple. PMax runs across Google's full inventory including Search. Smart Bidding chases conversions wherever it can find them at the lowest cost per acquisition. Branded clicks are cheap to convert because the user already knows your name. The algorithm pours spend into brand auctions because that is where the conversions sit, and it pays more than the manual baseline because the bid is set by target ROAS not by manual CPC.
The pattern shows up in three other places too. PMax campaigns starved of conversion data make erratic bids and pull spend out of competitive auctions. Account-level negative keyword lists that were set up years ago go untouched while campaign structures shift around them. And the brand exclusion controls Google added in 2024 sit unused in most accounts.
Why it matters
Google Ads spend is the single largest line item for most Australian SME marketing budgets. If 10 to 20% of that spend is going to clicks the business would have won organically or through a properly structured branded search campaign, the waste compounds every month. The platform does not flag it. The agency dashboard does not flag it. The campaign hits its target and everyone moves on.
For businesses with strong brand search volume, this leak is structural. The bigger the brand, the more attractive its branded terms look to PMax's automated bidding. The result is that mature brands pay PMax to compete with themselves while smaller competitors pay manual CPCs in the 20 to 30 cent range for the same kind of click.
Top-performing Google Ads accounts in 2026 allocate 70% to Performance Max, 20% to dedicated branded search, 10% to experimental standard campaigns
What to do about it
Turn on brand exclusions in every PMax campaign. Add your brand terms, common misspellings, and any product trademarks to the brand list. This is a 10 minute job that pays for itself the first week.
Run a dedicated branded search campaign on manual CPC or maximise clicks. Cap the budget at what your branded search volume justifies. This holds the cheap branded clicks at the price they should cost.
Apply account-level negative keyword lists that block competitor terms and irrelevant queries from sneaking into PMax through Search inventory.
Review your bid strategy on low-conversion campaigns. If a campaign has fewer than 30 conversions in the last 30 days, Smart Bidding is making decisions on too little data. Move to manual or maximise conversions until the volume is there.
Benchmark your branded CPC against what a cold competitor would pay. If you are bidding $1.50 for a click on your own name and a competitor would bid 20 cents to land in the same auction, that gap is recoverable margin.
The best PMax accounts in Australia treat the campaign as one channel inside a structured account, not as the whole account. The accounts that hand everything to PMax and trust the algorithm tend to look fine on paper and bleed money in the gap between the campaign report and the bank statement.