Are Performance Max campaigns a Scam?
I’m managing 40+ Google Ads account. Over the past few months, I’ve tested PMax campaigns in many of those accounts with what seems to be astounding results. With the same budget, my clients are getting 5-10x more conversions with PMax than with a standard Search campaign. I was amazed at how Google is doing much better than I do at managing campaigns.
But I had some doubts in regards to those “extra” conversions. Most of them were coming from a click on the call extension or a click on the phone number on the mobile website. Wouldn’t be easy for Google just to inflate the numbers? That a question that I’ve always had in my mind.
In order to clear all doubts, I did the following with one of my client’s account, who also had some doubts about the volume of phone calls shown in the reports. We pointed the PMax campaign ads to a duplicate of the original landing page. On the duplicate, we changed the company’s phone number for my client’s cell phone. This way, he would personnally assess the volume of phone calls and whether they are qualified or not. By creating a new page with a different phone number, it allowed us my client’s phone number in the call extension.
Two weeks after we set that up, I had a meeting with the client. I showed him the numbers : 70 calls in 2 weeks, which should have been 5 calls a day. He said he didn’t get ANY call to his cell phone. So I double-checked everything just to make sure that I was set up correctly – and it was.
I would like to have your thoughts about PMax campaigns. Besides the lack of transparency by Google in relation to PMax campaigns, I have evidence that the numbers are inflated – or is there anything I’m missing out?
The short answer is:
Your experiment strongly suggests that you are encountering an issue where Performance Max (PMax) campaigns are optimizing aggressively for a low-quality conversion signal, specifically the ‘Click to Call’ event, which Google may be over-counting or receiving from low-intent/bot traffic across its networks.
The solution is to move away from relying on simple ‘Click to Call’ events and implement a more robust, server-side tracking method like importing offline conversions via the Google Ads API, ideally managed through a server-side Google Tag Manager (GTM) setup using a service like Stape or your own Google Cloud Platform environment.
This will allow you to send only verified, qualified phone calls back to PMax, thus training the algorithm on actual business results rather than inflated vanity metrics.
The long answer is:
Your experience with PMax is unfortunately a common scenario, particularly for lead generation advertisers where call extensions and on-site phone number clicks are tracked as conversions.
While PMax excels at finding conversion opportunities across all of Google’s inventory (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps), it will heavily prioritize the conversion action with the highest volume and lowest CPA if all conversion actions are weighted equally.
In your case, the simple click on a call extension or phone number on a mobile website is a very “shallow” conversion event.
It’s easy for bots or low-intent users on Display/Video/Search Partner networks to trigger these events, especially a ‘Click on a number on your mobile website’ event, which is just a click and not a verified call.
When PMax sees 5-10x more conversions from this cheap action, it pushes more budget towards it, creating a feedback loop of high-volume, low-quality calls.
Your test where 70 reported calls resulted in zero calls to your client’s cell phone is compelling evidence of this inflation or poor traffic quality.
The key is to give PMax a “deeper,” more accurate signal to optimize against.
The most robust way to do this for calls is to use Offline Conversion Tracking (OCT) via the Google Ads API.
This allows you to track the calls in an external system, like a dedicated call tracking platform or your client’s CRM, verify the call quality (e.g., duration, whether it was answered, lead qualification status), and then send only the truly qualified calls back to Google Ads as an ‘Imported Phone Call’ conversion.
A powerful and cost-effective way to manage this entire process is using Google Ads API in conjunction with a server-side GTM environment.
You can deploy your server-side GTM container on a cheap platform like Google Cloud Platform or a specialized server-side GTM hosting solution like Stape.
Here is how this works: The user clicks the ad, and a unique Google Click ID (gclid) is generated and passed to your landing page and into your client’s cell phone number tracking system.
When a qualified call is received, your tracking system or CRM records the gclid, the call details, and the time.
A server-side GTM setup using a service like Stape acts as a dedicated first-party endpoint to receive and process this data.
You can then use the Google Ads API (which you can manage either via a custom script or a pre-built Stape template/tool) to take the qualified call data and the associated gclid and send it back to Google Ads as a validated conversion.
This is the ultimate “clean signal” that PMax needs, as it’s verifiable, qualified data, which will force the algorithm to optimize for high-quality, high-value clicks, thereby solving the inflation issue you’re seeing and turning PMax from a ‘scam’ into a powerful tool.
It is often much cheaper than paying for a full-featured call tracking software monthly fee for 40+ accounts, and gives you total control over the data being sent back.
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