Performance Max has been running Shopping and search budgets for years with almost no way to know which products were converting in which asset groups, or which audience segments were eating the most money. That's changing.
Google has added two new reporting features to PMax that address both of these long-standing gaps. Both are live now. Neither is buried in beta.
What actually changed
The first report is product performance by asset group. Previously, you could see which products converted inside a PMax campaign, but you couldn't connect that performance to a specific asset group. That meant if you had separate asset groups for different product categories — or different creative strategies — you were flying blind on which creative context was working for which products.
The new report breaks product-level data (impressions, clicks, conversions, conversion value) down by asset group. If you run separate asset groups for, say, "men's outerwear" and "women's dresses," you can now see whether each product category is actually converting inside the creative context built around it — or whether it's cannibalizing a neighboring asset group's budget and momentum.
The second report is audience segment spend. This tells you how PMax is distributing budget across different audience types: new users, existing customers, remarketing lists. If you're layering Smart Bidding signals but have no idea whether the spend is going toward cold audiences or warming up people who already visited your site, this is the report you've been missing.
Both changes went live June 15, 2026, tied to expanded API coverage across all PMax network surfaces.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Most PMax accounts run multiple asset groups, and most account managers have no reliable way to diagnose performance differences between them. When a PMax campaign underperforms, the diagnosis has been guesswork: bad creative? Wrong products? Budget cannibalizing itself?
Product reporting by asset group removes one layer of that guesswork. You can now check whether your high-margin products are converting inside the asset group built around them, or getting served in a creative context that doesn't match the intent behind those products.
The audience segment spend report matters even more for accounts with distinct lifecycle segments. If you're excluding past purchasers from cold-audience campaigns — or trying to — the spend data shows whether the signal is actually working or whether the algorithm is quietly recycling budget into familiar audiences while appearing to prospect.
This is where the reporting gets uncomfortable in a useful way. Some accounts will discover that "acquisition" campaigns are spending 60–70% of their budget on people already in their remarketing pool. That's not a targeting failure you can see in ROAS. It's a structural problem you can only catch in audience segment spend data.
What to pull first
Open the asset group report in your PMax campaign. Add the product performance columns and filter by asset group. Look for two things: products converting in asset groups they don't belong in, and products with high impression share but zero conversions inside a specific creative context. Either of those points to a structural problem, not a bid problem.
Then pull the audience segment spend report. Compare the percentage of budget going to new users versus remarketing. If more than half the spend in a stated acquisition campaign is going into existing customer or remarketing segments, the campaign is doing something different than what you set it up to do. That's fixable — but only once you can see it.
Neither report tells you exactly what to fix on its own. Both tell you where to look. That's what was missing.
The black box still has walls
These are real improvements and worth acting on. But PMax still doesn't show creative performance broken out by placement type at the asset group level. You can see channel-level budget distribution in the channel breakdown report, but you can't control where the budget goes between Search, YouTube, and Display.
The reporting is better. The control is not. For accounts where channel mix matters — brands where YouTube and Shopping serve fundamentally different roles — you're still working with partial information.
Use the new data to tighten what you can: asset group structure, product groupings, audience exclusions. The rest is still Google's decision, made inside a system that doesn't explain its reasoning.
If you want a full picture of how your PMax structure is working across products, audiences, and asset groups, the free audit at Gromerce pulls the key signals in about three minutes.
PMax got more transparent. It's still not open.
Sources: Google Ads Developer Blog, Search Engine Roundtable, Digital Phablet, June 2026
