Media Briefing: Digiday consults David Dweck on Google’s PMax Pullback

Digiday brought in David Dweck, president at Go Fish Digital, for its look at a quiet but significant shift in Google’s Performance Max product. Since PMax launched in 2022, its black-box automation has left media buyers with little visibility or control over where their budgets actually land, frustrating enough advertisers that some pulled clients off the product entirely. Now Google is piloting a feature that lets advertisers exclude Google Display Network and third-party search partner inventory, placements buyers have long viewed as lower-quality remnant space, from their PMax campaigns. It’s a small change on its face, but it hands buyers a level of granular control over PMax that hasn’t existed before.

Key Takeaways

Media buyers finally get an opt-out (sort of). The opt-out feature appears in the PMax console as two checkboxes, one for Display Network and one for Search Partners, both enabled by default. Advertisers can now deselect either, giving them a way to exclude inventory types buyers have long treated as lower quality.

It’s a pilot program, and Google isn’t saying much. A Google spokesperson confirmed the limited rollout but declined to explain the timing or when wider access might follow. Some buyers reported the option simply appeared in their dashboards without notice, while others said they’d requested access and been denied.

The opt-out builds on a year of incremental transparency fixes. The checkbox feature follows earlier additions like channel-performance reporting, campaign-level negative keywords, and first-party audience exclusions, incremental changes that have gradually restored some buyer confidence in PMax since its 2022 launch.

The Go Fish Perspective

Dweck’s take is that this isn’t really a new feature so much as a correction. Display Network and Search Partners are, in his words, “sources of remnant inventory that Google [has] forced advertisers to opt into” with PMax since its launch, not additions advertisers ever asked for. Framed that way, the update looks less like a courtesy and more like Google fixing a default that didn’t serve buyers’ interests in the first place. It’s also hard to separate this change from the moment we’re in: with ChatGPT ads gaining ground and Google’s search revenue growth cooling from 19% to 17% year over year, giving buyers more of what they’ve been asking for is a low-cost way to keep them from looking elsewhere.

To learn more about insight tips and tricks from Google themselves, downloads Go Fish Insights: The New Google Growth Ecosystem. This briefs was built on proprietary insights from our Google partnership event show how Google’s AI, search, and commerce surfaces are reshaping discovery, consideration, and conversion.

Read the Full Story

Read the full piece, including how agencies like PMG and Crossmedia are already shifting spend in response, on Digiday.