"Our PMax is fully optimized."
A retailer tells me this at least once a week. The confidence is real. The product-level data rarely is.
When I ask, "Can you tell me what percentage is going to your hero products?", the response is usually: "We'd have to pull a product-level report."
If an account is fully optimized but no one can quickly explain where the budget is going, the word "optimized" is doing a lot of work. Two different things are being confused: campaign optimization and strategic alignment.
"We've Already Optimized Our PMax"
Most retailers I speak to say something similar.
When I ask how PMax is being managed, the answer is usually consistent: weekly bid adjustments, audience tests, and pruning of underperformers. The agency is optimizing against ROAS, because that's the agreed KPI. What the agency doesn't have is the business data underneath: margin structure, strategic priorities, annual plans. That isn't anyone's fault. It just means the optimization is happening without business context.
The agency is doing its job perfectly. Conversion costs are down, click-through rates are up, the account looks healthy if you only look at standard PPC metrics.
But if you look at the business, something feels off. Margin-per-acquisition is down because budget has shifted to low-margin products that convert easily. Revenue from strategic products is down because they don't convert as quickly as bestsellers. The annual plan isn't tracking. The account is optimized. Just not for your goals.
Campaign Optimization vs Strategic Alignment
Campaign optimization is a tactical job. Within your current budget allocation and product structure, you make every euro work harder. Lower bids on weak performers, increase bids on strong ones, find the most efficient audiences, test new creatives. It's well-understood work. Any capable agency does this week to week.
Strategic alignment is a different job entirely. It asks whether your budget reflects your business priorities. Are your hero products getting hero-level investment? Are strategic categories funded strategically? Does your ad spending support your annual plan?
Most agencies don't answer those questions because they don't have access to the underlying business data: margins, strategic priorities, annual plans. They optimize without context. The two functions are independent. You can have a fully optimized PMax account that's completely misaligned with your strategy, and in most accounts I've seen, that's the normal state.
What Optimized Accounts Look Like Under the Hood
I've looked at dozens of accounts that agencies call "fully optimized." The pattern repeats: roughly 20% of products absorb more than half the budget because the algorithm has found the winners, another 30% get meaningful spend as the supporting cast, and the remaining 50% split whatever's left over. The algorithm is genuinely good at this. Conversion costs are low. ROAS looks healthy.
The question I ask is always the same. "Is that distribution your strategy?"
Usually the answer is no. The client planned to grow premium products, a quarter of the catalog, but those products were getting a fraction of the budget. New categories with no conversion history were nearly invisible. Seasonal inventory got almost nothing. Meanwhile, bestsellers the algorithm had identified as efficient were absorbing most of the budget.
The misalignment compounds over time. Winners get more conversion data, the algorithm learns faster, and budget concentrates further. After three to six months, the account is efficient and severely misaligned. Correcting it means asking the agency to drop short-term ROAS on purpose. Most retailers can't make that call.
Your Strategy. The Algorithm's Execution.
The choice between "fully optimized" and "strategically aligned" is a false one. You can do both, as long as the budget allocation is decided outside the algorithm.
Strategic Allocation is the outer loop: high-priority products get a defined share of the budget, standard products get theirs, low-priority products get theirs. Inside those guardrails, PMax still optimizes hard. It finds the highest-converting products in each segment, tests audience combinations, and pushes efficiency the same way it does today.
At Expanly we wire this up through Business Rules. You define segments using custom labels, data feeds, or business logic, allocate budget to those segments, and the targets hold week to week. PMax executes the optimization inside each segment.
For a mid-sized catalog, the initial setup takes about 30 minutes. After that, high-priority products get high-priority budget, new launches get the investment they need to grow, seasonal inventory gets a clearance budget, and the algorithm still does what it's best at.
