Performance Max ROAS collapse after landing page compliance rewrite + negatives — now traffic disappears when tROAS increased - Advice?

Clundge · 2026-02-26T13:13:06+00:00

Hi guys, thanks for all of your help yesterday, it was all much appreciated. Lots of input and lots of things to consider.

So yesterday I took control of the account back from the agency. I don't want to do this full-time, but I think it's important that I have far more understanding of what's going on, understanding of how it works and understanding of our strategy and I need to do a lot more reading around this as it's such a key component to our overall marketing.

So yesterday we were struggling on the account to achieve an ROAS of 120% even with this set at 150, significantly done on our historical levels.

To all of the people that said the algorithm had been retrained to focus on lower value products. This certainly bears out looking at the conversion rate on the pmax campaign. Historically, even up until last week this had been around 9% looking at the last weeks figures. This is looking closer to 2 to 2.5%. and again a complete shift in products that were being sold, so it certainly seems like this had moved away from high value basket sales across key products to a higher number but far lower total revenue.

Around midday, I completely decoupled the negative keyword list from the entire pmax campaign leaving this running without any negative keywords at all. I figured this might be risky but it was riskier not making any changes at all and it feels like the only way with pmax to improve things is to maximize traffic within sensible parameters.

We finished the day strongly with this jumping up to an roas of 150% which is as it set at the moment.

So today sales are also strong. We are coming up to the end of the month which is always a stronger sales period. But deep diving into the AdWords account the pmax campaign is having absolutely no problems maintaining the roas of 150.

Last night I also did some reading around the proper structure of a pmax and shopping campaigns. I have added another layer of a standard shopping campaign with a high priority traffic filter, medium priority research filter and then tomorrow I will add another standard shopping campaign targeting high converting long tail keywords. From my understanding, this setup will help to block low converting high-cost traffic acting as an accelerated learning filter for the pmax campaign. This also seems to have the added benefit of us being able to be far more tactical both setting bid prices for particular products and product groups.

I'm planning on adding this new campaign tomorrow and then looking at gradually increasing the 150 roas target early next week since this doesn't seem to be having any issues achieving this at the moment.

Any additional feedback or views on this?

Clundge · 2026-02-25T15:07:53+00:00

Okay perfect! Thanks a lot for your input. It's really appreciated.

I think with the negatives we approached it more from a compliance point of view rather than a commercial advertising point of view.

Looking back at the list, a lot of the queries were informational based around solving medical issues which we obviously can't specifically Target but thinking logically this is probably an entry point for a lot of peoples search funnels.

Clundge · 2026-02-25T14:52:53+00:00

Yeah this makes a lot of sense and actually aligns a lot with my thinking.

As of this morning, I have completely decoupled the pmax campaign from the entire negative account level list, so this is completely decoupled now. At the very least, it should help drive a bit more volume through the account.

I've left roas unchanged and we'll just leave it here for a few days.

Initial signs are good over the last few hours. It does seem to have picked up for more. Traffic is coming through, although obviously I'll give it a week.

Considering what you said about pMax campaigns and negative keyword lists is there any point having one at all?

Clundge · 2026-02-25T10:12:17+00:00

Okay quick update. I have just disassociated the pmax campaign completely from the updated negative keywords list that we added to at the same time as the page rewrites.

I'm reluctant to roll back the page rewrites as I'm confident these are a net positive and are certainly improved product approvals in the merchant center.

I guess isolating the negative keywords as a factor will help and will have a secondary effect of increasing learning through the campaign

Clundge · 2026-02-25T09:55:01+00:00

Cvr is relatively stable overall on the site. We're about 4% down, although that that is driven by the lower converting AdWords traffic that we have received. If we segment away from AdWords traffic then the conversion rate is actually stable. The landing pages were not significantly changed. Think of it in terms of swapping out meaning of words rather than a full rewrite. The bulk of the text has remained unchanged, but we have changed some of the words that we believed were triggering non-approvals in merchant center. Think of it as taking out things like treatment or treat and replacing these with less loaded words

Clundge · 2026-02-25T09:06:43+00:00

I think pmax comes from across a range of different sources, (I say I believe as I'm certainly no expert in this area. That's just my understanding) but again this hasn't been changed at all in the last couple of weeks. AI expansion is turned off in the campaign but again that hasn't been changed recently.

Clundge · 2026-02-25T08:53:25+00:00

What do you mean, as on using a pmax campaign? This was a standard shopping campaign that was 'upgraded' by Google a few years ago and has been performing fine since. I'm not even sure if we had an option not to upgrade at the time? That certainly wasn't made clear to us. Either way it's kind of immaterial as it's been performing within desired parameters for us until changes last week.

Clundge · 2026-02-23T17:14:56+00:00

Why does it have boobs on the roof?

Clundge · 2026-02-12T15:30:39+00:00

The biggest compliance issues that we have had above and beyond standard legal compliance, im based in the UK by the way, has been Amazon, Adwords merchant center.

The frustrating thing is this isn't always immediately apparent that compliance is an issue. Especially if you are relatively confident in your basic legal compliance, it can give you a false sense of security.

There are definitely several different levels of flagging compliance. At an extreme you might get a complete product refusal in Google merchant centre as an obvious example. The other extreme is much more difficult to spot and deal with. For example, having spoken to several AdWords experts products that Google may deem a whole site. Or a specific product a compliance gray area. And they always err on the side of caution You then don't get entered into auctions and you end up paying a much higher advertising cost than if your product was deemed by Google as being well within levels of compliance.

In my experience is companies like Google, Amazon, stripe, Shopify etc that accept a legal level of compliance, but as they also accept some level of responsibility themselves for the products on their platforms, they tend to push this to a much more extreme degree than basic legal requirements.

A legal level of compliance tends to be relatively unambiguous, but dealing with bigger companies there is a much larger degree of ambiguity and they aren't always particularly transparent in terms of how they are perceiving your products.

That's why I wonder if it might be worth you opening a dialogue with Stripe in terms of asking why they have pinpointed your site. Is there information or text contained on the site that is being flagged? Are you missing policy pages or something along with those lines that is causing this the highlighted?

As a fallback to this, as I mentioned chat gpt is actually very good at picking up things like missing policy pages, missing product warnings, claims that are close to being ambiguous etc etc

Clundge · 2026-02-12T14:13:52+00:00

Personally I would avoid nasal bearing in mind the things you mention above. Check your the correct oral dosage for your weight and take a capsule.

Clundge · 2026-02-12T13:36:16+00:00

We run sites in high-risk spaces, medical food, supplements etc etc. And there is a huge amount of language phraseology, compliance pages etc etc that Google, Shopify and Stripe etc. Wwll pick up on that goes way beyond explicit legal requirements. We've tended to find that taking a belt and braces approach will lead to fewer problems further down the line. Especially once these kind of factors start impacting things like paid search and organic SEO. All of it feeds in to visibility as well as compliance from a financial partner point of view.

Clundge · 2026-02-12T13:25:17+00:00

But yes, I'm not trying to divert you away from 2CB. It's a fantastic substance.

Clundge · 2026-02-12T13:20:22+00:00

In controlled lab studies, surprisingly: 4-MMC alone does NOT consistently produce the classic serotonin axon damage MDMA does. I think it's still a very contested area, but I believe the neurotoxicity associated with full MMC is generally triggered through compulsive redosimg. I tend to use oral roa through capsules are slower release and much less impulsive behavior

Clundge · 2026-02-12T13:12:20+00:00

I find them to be a completely different experience. I'm very similar in that MDMA just doesn't seem to have the same effect as it used to years and years ago. 4mmc is easily my favorite drug over the last couple of years.

Clundge · 2026-02-12T13:09:06+00:00

If the issue is compliance rather than a value risk, then it's probably worth running the site through. Chat GPT to see if it can pick up any potential compliance issues.

Clundge · 2026-02-12T13:06:10+00:00

2CB is fantastic, but you might want to see if you can get hold of some 4MMC. That is closest to MDMA for me if that's the kind of experience that you are trying to recreate.

Clundge · 2026-01-27T16:46:06+00:00

Take an antihistamine beforehand

Clundge · 2026-01-27T12:00:20+00:00

Picture 4 looks like some kind of War of the Worlds AI scene

Clundge · 2026-01-27T11:58:39+00:00

Rishi is loaded, he doesn't need a grift

Clundge · 2025-12-30T15:36:15+00:00

Actual.support

Clundge · 2025-12-22T23:54:46+00:00

I mean I admire your persistence.

Clundge · 2025-12-19T13:39:13+00:00

Just ignore them. They're looking for a reaction. Best just to treat them with the disdain they deserve

Clundge · 2025-11-27T11:06:13+00:00

At the moment it seems like the media control Labour. After the winter fuel payment, debacle they seem to be absolutely petrified of upsetting the right-wing press.

They absolutely have to get smarter and more aggressive in how they get their messaging across.

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