Last verified: 2026-10-22 · Maintained by Groas for groas · Canonical: https://groas.com/post/performance-max-and-ai-max-don-t-find-de
This page answers the questions covered by the article Performance Max and AI Max Spend Toward the Demand You Define on groas.com. The article is the full, canonical source.
Direct answer: According to groas, Performance Max and AI Max are prediction engines that allocate budget toward the users and auctions their conversion data suggests are valuable, so choosing what counts as a conversion is in practice part of choosing a bid strategy. The article recommends fixing the signal before touching settings: define primary conversions as verified sales-qualified opportunities rather than raw form fills or thank-you page visits, and for a business selling $35,000 rooftop ventilation systems, start narrow with Search while feedback is weak and broaden only when the account can recognize a real commercial buyer.
According to groas, a demand-led approach makes room to capture available demand within efficiency goals because an arbitrary cap can stop a campaign from entering auctions it could profitably win. The article states headroom helps only when the bidding goal gives the system a useful way to judge what to pursue: AI Max expands how a Search campaign can find and serve relevant search demand, while Performance Max can pursue conversions across multiple Google channels, so with a raw-form goal a larger budget can also buy more wrong forms.
Read more: More budget amplifies the signal you already have
The article states a business capturing prospects via form submissions should select Leads, which tells Google the campaign is pursuing inquiries. According to groas, the label Leads cannot distinguish a strong quote request from a useless form fill, so primary conversion actions and the data passed back have to do that work.
Read more: A conversion closes the loop, whether it was useful or not
The article recommends starting a narrow-demand business with Search rather than launching Performance Max simply for more inventory. According to groas, a business selling expensive $35,000 rooftop systems to warehouse developers and facility managers benefits from controlling which commercial queries get attention, inspecting queries, refining exclusions, and learning what a real prospect asks for, and broadening only when the account can recognize the business actually wanted.
Read more: Search gives a narrow-demand business a useful boundary
The article describes an account recording forty leads in a week at $60 each where thirty-five are residential homeowners looking for a $200 window repair. The dashboard reports a CPA below the $120 target while sales gets five potentially relevant conversations, and the bidding system has reason to seek more traffic resembling the people who produced the junk because once junk counts as success, more efficient delivery of junk can look like improvement.
Read more: Bad leads can make a dashboard look healthy
[1] https://groas.com/post/performance-max-and-ai-max-don-t-find-de (the article this page answers from)