How to reduce low-quality leads from Performance Max campaigns

When left to its own devices, there are a couple of things Performance Max is absolutely great at doing for lead gen campaigns:

• Driving volume.
• Finding the lowest-quality leads it possibly can.

It’s not inherently surprising that Google is doing what’s best for Google – that is, lining its own pockets – by heavily optimizing toward the cheapest, path-of-least-resistance conversion events.

From experience with campaigns we inherit from new clients, this performance often catches brands off guard – especially those who take Google sales reps’ “helpful advice” at face value.

It can take time for those brands to look past PMax’s shiny, low CPAs and realize the truth: those leads do little to nothing for real pipeline or revenue.

However, Performance Max, when given the proper guardrails, can be a good source of incremental, quality leads – but the trick is in building those guardrails. 

This article covers lead quality tactics that work and how to execute them, tactics that don’t work, and important differences between Performance Max campaigns in Google and Bing. 

How to improve lead quality in PMax campaigns

These are the specific levers that consistently influence lead quality in Performance Max.

• Use conversion goals focused on metrics that indicate a higher quality lead than just form fills.
  • Depending on your data density, this could mean closed-won leads, opportunities, or (if you need to go up the funnel to get enough volume) sales-qualified leads. 
  • It’s important to note that the effectiveness of this tactic depends on good offline conversion tracking implementation and a clean CRM instance, so don’t turn on PMax lead gen campaigns until you’re confident in your HubSpot or Salesforce integrity.
• Use high-value lists for audience signals. This can be based on a certain activity, like “booked a meeting,” instead of simply including all converters.
• Keep the focus on the right audiences. Exclude irrelevant ones and upload Customer Match lists to help Google’s algorithm find similar users.
• Be smart with your campaign settings.
  • Use brand exclusions to ensure you’re not letting PMax cannibalize your brand traffic. 
  • Restrict your location targeting to high-performing geos.
  • Set strategic scheduling, such as excluding early-morning hours if those conversions tend to be lower quality.
  • Evaluate search themes and placements, and be aggressive about negative keywords and placement exclusions.
  • Use sitelinks to steer traffic to pages with full, detailed forms.
• Refine the forms themselves.
  • Implement reCAPTCHA or honeypot fields in forms that keep bots from “converting.”
  • Use field validation:
    • Block disposable domains.
    • Block freemails.
  • Add freeform or disqualifying questions.
    • “How did you hear about us?”
    • “Do you have a budget for [solution]?”
    • “How many employees are in your organization?”

Dig deeper: Top Performance Max optimization tips for 2026

Tactics that won’t affect lead quality

On the other hand, some of the usual campaign optimization strategies won’t do much to move the needle on PMax lead quality. If that’s your sole focus, you can de-prioritize:

• Switching bid strategies (e.g., switching from Max Conversions to tCPA helps a little but doesn’t fix everything).
• Adding more assets.
• Adding more budget.
• Asking Google support (something I’d just stay away from in general these days).

Important (and subtle) differences to know between Google and Bing PMax campaigns

Both Google and Bing have Performance Max campaigns, but there are differences in their offerings.

Google’s Performance Max network spans search, display, YouTube, discovery campaigns, and Gmail. It’s an absolutely huge amount of inventory – especially display and YouTube, which can be huge spam drivers if left unchecked.

Microsoft has far less video and display inventory. Their PMax campaigns primarily include Bing search, syndicated search, and the Microsoft audience network (which spans display, Outlook, and MSN). 

When comparing performance between the two, we haven’t seen any notable differences, but it’s worth monitoring updates to each platform’s reporting and inventory going forward.

Dig deeper: Google and Microsoft: How their Performance Max approaches align and diverge

Performance Max isn’t broken, but it needs control

If you’re considering running PMax for lead gen, you should approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

While PMax has been effective at driving scalable revenue for ecommerce,those campaigns need considerable guidelines to maintain lead quality. 

For instance, preventing a high-end shoe retailer from racking up tons of conversions on things like replacement laces and shoe polish will require that the campaign develop sufficient PMax guardrails.

Considering how Google is moving toward additional automation and AI in campaigns, it’s important to keep testing and experimenting to gain an understanding of the tools available to analyze and shape PMax campaigns. 

Google has issued some new releases to help as of late, including channel-level reporting, more options for exclusions, and campaign-level negative keywords.) 

There is a lead scale out there that can provide a healthy ROAS if you’re willing and able to wrestle the algorithm into submission. 

If you’ve tested Performance Max campaigns for lead gen but paused them once it was clear they weren’t driving revenue, do a quick post-mortem on your past efforts. You might find there’s room to whip Google into shape to do better this time around. 

Take note of the tactics you haven’t yet implemented and prioritize putting them in place before you waste another dollar of your 2026 budget on poor-quality leads that just junk up your CRM.