Back

Making Performance Max work for B2B Thumbnail

Apr 23, 202614 min read

Performance Max has never been considered a Google ads campaign type suited for B2B lead gen campaigns. But is that changing? Our expert panel discusses.

Making Performance Max Work for B2B: Strategies, Signals & Scale

Advanced PPC strategies

For a long time, the B2B PPC community's relationship with Performance Max could be summed up in two words: frustrated and sceptical.

The leads were junk, the black box was impenetrable, and the general consensus was that Google had built another product for e-commerce advertisers and quietly hoped B2B would figure it out by themselves.

That consensus is shifting; but slowly, carefully, and with a lot of caveats.

To dig into what's actually changed and what B2B marketers need to do differently, we brought together three of the sharpest minds in B2B lead gen: Andrea Cruz, Head of B2B at Tinuiti; Julie Friedman Bacchini, founder of Neptune Moon and manager of the PPC Chat community; and Sophie Logan, lead gen paid media specialist and editorial manager at Rough Agenda.

Over the course of about an hour, they gave us an honest, unvarnished look at where PMax stands for B2B right now - what's working, what still isn't, and what you absolutely need to have in place before you even think about turning it on.

And, most importantly, a definitive answer on whether you should turn it on in the first place.

Watch the full session on-demand here - or keep reading for the written rundown:

Video timestamps:

0:00 - Intro / meet the panel
05:05 - [Icebreaker] Google retires DSA in favour of AI Max
07:18 - Agenda
09:35 - PMax & B2B: A complicated history
13:52 - Is PMax ready for B2B
20:04 - What needs to be in place before using PMax for B2B
27:07 - When PMax is NOT the right fit
31:30 - Managing lead quality in PMax
35:30 - Dealing with spam leads
41:01 - IVT by Google Campaign Type
43:10 - Where PMax fits into account structure
47:55 - Looking ahead - PMax & AI Overviews
49:55 - Planning, skills, & staying relevant
53:14 - Q&A with the live audience

Is Performance Max finally ready for B2B?

The short answer is: for some advertisers, yes. For many others, not yet.

Andrea Cruz has been one of the more vocal sceptics of Performance Max for B2B lead gen. Three years ago, she would have told any B2B advertiser to avoid it outright.

While her position has evolved, she's careful not to oversell it:

"If you think about a traditional bell curve, I think PMax is now starting to ramp up. It's not at the top by any means, but it's just starting to work. It doesn't work for everyone — but it is starting to work for some B2B advertisers, which is exciting."

Part of what's changed isn't a specific product feature. It's that the system itself has simply got better at recognizing niche audiences and allocating effort accordingly.

Andrea's take is that Google has given B2B advertisers very little in terms of new controls, but the underlying machine learning has matured to a point where it can at least identify that "this is something niche, and this is where I have to focus."

Sophie Logan had posted on LinkedIn just five months before the webinar about how she didn't run PMax for B2B - too many unknowns, too little control. Her view has softened since then:

"I love being proved wrong. I still think it's quite risky for some advertisers for B2B lead gen if they haven't got the foundations right. But I am warming up to it. I'm starting to use it a little bit more, and I'm seeing it be more successful for clients."

The framing that perhaps best captures PMax's current state comes from Tinuiti's Patrick Ortenzio, who described it as "a readiness test - it only works if you have better signals, sufficient scale, and plenty of patience to let the automation learn."

That's not a criticism, but rather a diagnosis. And it's the lens through which every B2B advertiser should be evaluating whether Performance Max deserves a place in their account.

The Non-Negotiables: What you must have in place first

If you’re looking for a quick answer on whether or not to use PMax, this is the section you’ll need to pay the most attention to. Before you even consider launching PMax for B2B lead gen, there are a few things that simply have to be in order.

Conversion volume: the threshold that determines everything

Julie Bacchini has been making this point consistently for the past year, and nothing she's seen since has changed her mind. The benchmark is roughly 50 conversions per month. Fall consistently below that (and especially below 30) and you're fighting the algorithm rather than working with it.

"If you don't have the volume, it is harder. I'm not going to sugarcoat it — it really is harder," she said. "The system is just not designed to work with that smaller amount of data. It's not impossible, but you have to be a lot more creative, and you have to try a lot more things."

The analogy she used is that, below the threshold, PMax feels like it's hovering on a treadmill. It's doing something, but it can't find momentum. It can't kick into the next gear the way high-volume accounts do. You're stuck in a kind of limbo: past the learning phase on paper, but not actually delivering the efficiency gains the platform is capable of.

This threshold problem is compounded in B2B because even getting to 30-50 monthly conversions can be difficult when your sales cycle is measured in months and your deal volume is low.

If this is relatable to you, don’t worry - it's not a failure of strategy, but rather a structural mismatch between how Google's automation is built and how B2B businesses actually operate.

Data integrity: do you actually trust what you're passing back?

This one came up from Andrea, and it's easy to overlook.

The conversion data you're feeding back into Google is the foundation everything else is built on. If that data is unreliable, if the numbers coming out of Salesforce don't match reality, if your CRM integration has gaps, if you're not sure whether your tracked conversions actually represent qualified leads - then the signals you're sending the algorithm are noise.

Andrea shared an example from a recent client call:

"The client was saying, 'I don't believe these numbers.' And we're like, 'They're from your Salesforce account.' And they said, 'I don't know if they're accurate.' So then what are we doing?"

It's a fair question. If you don't trust your own data, you definitely shouldn't expect PMax to do anything useful with it.

Sophie's suggestion was to get a second pair of eyes on your account before launch. When you're too close to your own setup, it's easy to assume things are working correctly when they're not:

"Sometimes it's easier just to have the extra pair of eyes when you are missing those fundamentals. Someone else can come in and give you that unbiased and fresh opinion."

First-party data: give the algorithm something to work with

Beyond making sure your conversion tracking is solid, passing first-party data back to Google is one of the most meaningful things you can do to improve PMax performance in a B2B context.

Your best customer lists, your highest-value segments - feeding those into the system gives it a far better starting point for finding people who actually look like your ideal buyers. Without it, PMax is essentially guessing.

Andrea mentioned that first-party data from your top customers or best-performing segments is a non-negotiable signal input if you want PMax to have any real chance of working for B2B.

Budget and offline conversion data

Two further points worth noting from the discussion: campaigns running on under roughly $3,000 per month are unlikely to generate enough conversion signals for the smart bidding to function properly.

And running PMax on front-end signals alone, without piping offline conversion data back into Google Ads automatically, is a critical mistake in a B2B environment.

This is commonly seen as a serious malpractice in a B2B environment, which is a strong way to put it, but not unfair. In B2B, a form fill is not a conversion, but a qualified opportunity is.

If Google doesn't know the difference, it will optimize for the wrong thing.

When PMax is the wrong choice

Knowing when not to use PMax is just as important as knowing when to use it - maybe more so. The panel was clear that there are specific scenarios where B2B advertisers should simply stay away.

If your total monthly budget for PMax would be around $2,000 or less, you're unlikely to get anything useful out of it.

Andrea was blunt on this: "You're just not gonna get anything out of it." The system needs enough budget to gather signals and iterate. A small budget in a niche B2B market is just not going to cut it.

If you're considering PMax purely as a way to target a fixed customer list, that's a misunderstanding of what it actually does. Andrea mentioned receiving an RFP where the brief was essentially to use PMax to target a specific set of customers - and only that set. That's not how it works.

Customer lists inform the algorithm; they don't constrain it. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

The FOMO problem also came up, and it's surprisingly prevalent.

Sophie introduced the concept of "JOMO" - the joy of missing out - as a useful reframe for B2B advertisers being pushed towards PMax by clients or stakeholders who've seen it talked up.

"A lot of businesses and CMOs are starting to see PMax as a tap for leads. And that is not the case. It's being mis-sold as a quick and easy way to get going — and as we've discussed, it's not always that."

Julie's test before adding PMax to any account is, ‘have you fully maxed out standard search?’

There's a tendency for PMax to come up in account reviews because of FOMO, when the reality is that there's often still significant ground left to cover in search.

"Make sure you have mined everything you can from what you're already doing, and then look at adding on another layer."

PMax earns its place in B2B when you have a long sales cycle, a decent-sized addressable audience, and you want to use it for prospecting - getting relevant people to take a specific action at the top of the funnel. That's the scenario where Andrea and her team have consistently seen it deliver.

Retaining control & protecting lead quality

Assuming you've cleared the readiness bar, the next challenge is managing PMax without either strangling it or letting it run completely unchecked. This is where a lot of B2B advertisers come unstuck.

Algorithm drift: the squirrel problem

Julie has written and spoken about this extensively, and it's one of the more insidious risks of running PMax for B2B.

Left to its own devices, PMax will gradually expand into search terms and audiences that look promising to the algorithm but are commercially useless to you. It's not malfunctioning, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is find conversions.

The problem is that "conversions" and "qualified B2B leads" are not the same thing unless you've told Google otherwise.

"You want to give it freedom to push some boundaries and try moving in different directions. But you can't just give it completely free rein — it'll do some crazy stuff. It's like a dog that sees a squirrel. You can let it explore, but you also need guardrails."

The practical implication: actively monitor what PMax is doing.

Where is it serving?
What queries is it responding to?
Do you already know that certain directions are wasteful - and can you build in smart exclusions to prevent budget leaking there?

A useful tool highlighted during the session is the free PMax search term excluder script, shared via Ads Intelligence.

It's designed to automatically remove irrelevant search terms from your PMax campaigns, preventing budget from quietly disappearing into searches that have no commercial value for your business.

Spam leads and managing the learning phase

The first four to six weeks of a PMax campaign are the hardest to read, and unfortunately are also the period when junk leads are most likely to come through. Sophie's advice here is simple enough, but often skipped: talk to your sales team before you launch.

"I know it's difficult to have that feedback with them — and we're not asking for permission. It's just to give them the heads up so if they do see a massive influx, they can feed that back to you quickly. CRM data is great, but the person speaking to them on the phone can give you more context on whether these leads are actually any good."

That real-time feedback loop is critical. If lead quality signals aren't making their way back into the system, PMax will keep doing more of whatever is generating form fills - regardless of whether those form fills are from your ideal buyers.

As Julie put it:

"If that kind of feedback is not coming back into the system, the system thinks it's killing it. And so it's gonna keep doing more of what it's doing."

On the monitoring side, Julie's recommendation is to watch placements and be ready to act when you spot PMax chasing easy volume in the wrong places. The platform has limited granularity compared to standard search, but you can still intervene when something is clearly off.

Invalid traffic: a real cost at scale

Our own 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report found that PMax has an average invalid traffic rate of 7.88%, compared to 5.21% for standard search.

On face value, that difference might seem marginal. But at enterprise scale - accounts spending millions per year - it represents a commercially meaningful increase in exposure to bot traffic and fake leads.

The gap is largely driven by the lower-quality display and video inventory that PMax can dip into, though PMax's tendency to weight budget towards search helps moderate the overall figure.

If you're running PMax at significant spend levels, it's worth auditing how much invalid traffic your campaigns are generating relative to your standard search activity.

A brief note on micro conversions

One of the most upvoted questions from the live audience was about using micro conversions (lower-intent actions like form displays or quote starts) to help low-volume B2B accounts hit the conversion thresholds needed for PMax to function.

The panel answered by stating that micro conversions can be a legitimate tool, but only if you assign values to them.

Julie stated:

"If you use micro conversions in any way, shape, or form, you must assign values to them, or Google will decide that the easy stuff is what you want." Without values, you're essentially telling the algorithm that a form display is as good as a qualified opportunity. Andrea and Sophie both agreed immediately.

Final thoughts

This post covers the main highlights, but there's a lot more information and context from our expert panel in the full recording - including the live Q&A, where the panel tackled questions on signals and spam prevention, testing PMax by region, and the broader impact of generative AI on Google Ads lead volume.

You can watch the full session on demand here.

A big thank you to Andrea, Julie, and Sophie for bringing the honesty and the expertise to the session in equal measure.

Connect with them on LinkedIn for more insights on B2B lead gen, including tips, best practices, and the techniques they’re using to successfully scale accounts.

Find the links to follow our panel - along with all the documents, resources, tools, and articles mentioned throughout the session - below.