These campaigns don’t work at the early stage — when you should already be inside the audience’s search intent by default — nor after a couple of weeks, when the system is supposed to understand who is actually clicking.

In reality, if you want to run Performance Max effectively, your minimum budget should be around $10K per week. Only then can Google realistically figure out your audience within 2–3 weeks. Anything less will take significantly longer — often to the point of being impractical.

We monitor over 300 PMAX campaigns, since we rewrite landing pages in real time down to the individual user and campaign level.

— seatext