Where your Performance Max ads actually run is one of the hardest questions to answer about the campaign, which is strange given it's your money moving across Google's entire network.

The surfaces PMax can use

A single PMax campaign can place ads across all of these at once:

  • Search, including the queries you can only see as categories.
  • Shopping, if you've connected a product feed.
  • YouTube, as in-stream and in-feed video.
  • Display, across the Google Display Network.
  • Gmail, Maps, and Discover.

It decides the mix, moment to moment, based on where it thinks your goal is cheapest to hit.

Why the mix matters so much

Those surfaces are not equal. A conversion from a high-intent Search query is worth far more than an accidental click on a cheap Display placement, yet PMax reports them together.

Two campaigns with the same cost per conversion can be completely different businesses underneath, depending on whether the spend went to Search or to Display.

What you can actually see

Google added a Channel Performance report in 2025, which shows impressions, interactions, conversions, and conversion value per channel. The catch is that it reports results by channel, not cost, so you see where conversions came from but still not how much budget each channel ate. Alongside it, the placement report shows some of where Display and YouTube ads ran, the Insights tab hints at themes, and pulling data into BigQuery preserves what the UI drops.

It's still not a spend-by-channel view, since cost isn't broken out, but between the channel report and the rest you can finally tell roughly where results, and money, are going.

What you can control

You have more levers than you did at launch, even if none of them is a clean channel toggle:

  • Account-level placement exclusions, to block junk Display and app placements.
  • Brand exclusion lists, so PMax stops spending on your own brand searches.
  • Content suitability and inventory settings, to keep ads off content you don't want.

The Display drift to watch for

Left alone, PMax often drifts toward cheap Display and app impressions, because they're easy volume against a conversion goal that's being loosely modeled.

That's where the quiet waste hides, so the placement exclusions above are worth setting even though Google buries them.

Where your Performance Max ads actually run is the question the campaign works hardest to obscure. Piece it together from the placement report, the Insights tab, and BigQuery, exclude the junk, and at least you know which surface is spending your budget.

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