Performance Max for tour operators: useful, risky, and changing

PMax can sell tours. It can also hide where the money goes and claim bookings your brand already earned. And for Things to do, Google is retiring the old setup and moving travel advertisers into Search with AI Max. What the audits keep showing, and what to do about it.

The direct answer first. Performance Max can produce bookings for a tour business, but two things have changed in 2026. Things to do is Google's ad format for tours, attractions and activities. Google is retiring the old setup and moving travel advertisers into Search campaigns with AI Max. And the audits I run keep showing the same quiet problems hiding inside PMax reporting. If you run tour campaigns on PMax today, this guide is what I would want you to know.

The control model is the real issue

I am not against PMax as a product. It sells for plenty of accounts. The problem is what it hides. You hand Google your product feed, which is the list of tours it advertises from, plus your budget, and it decides the rest. What you get back is a report you cannot look inside.

The part that hurt most for years was the searches. PMax showed grouped themes instead of the exact thing someone typed. So when someone searching for museum tickets got shown your food-tour ad, you could not see it or block it. Google has been giving query-level search terms and campaign-level negative keywords back through 2025 and 2026. That is real progress, and it is still less control than a Search campaign gives you.

Where PMax quietly takes credit for your brand

You may have heard people say PMax eats brand traffic. Here is what that actually means. Unless you set up brand exclusions, PMax is allowed to serve on searches for your own company name. Those searchers were already coming to you. They typed your name. When PMax serves that impression and takes the booking, the campaign report claims a conversion that your brand earned years earlier.

The result is a ROAS that flatters the campaign, and budget decisions get made on that number. The bookings are real, but the campaign did not win them.

Two checks tell you whether it is happening to you.

• Open the search category insights and look for your own brand name and close misspellings of it
• Check whether brand exclusions are configured on the campaign at all. In most accounts I open, they are not

What I keep finding inside PMax audits

These are patterns from real audits of live accounts, anonymised. Every one of them changed how the account owner read their own numbers.

• A campaign called Performance Max that put 99% of its spend on the plain search network. On the overview it reads as a cross-channel campaign. In practice it was an expensive search campaign with less control
• The single largest search category in the report was unlabelled, with no way to see what the queries were
• A competitor brand term was added as a negative, and a month later the report still showed spend against it
• Asset groups, which are the PMax version of ad groups, pointing at the homepage instead of the tour page the ad promised
• The product feed left as one undivided bucket, so every tour competed inside a single group with no structure
• Three purchase trackers counting in parallel and disagreeing with each other, while the campaign optimised toward one of them

None of these show up on the overview screen. All of them shape the number you see there.

For tour operators, the ground is moving anyway

The bigger 2026 story is that Google is retiring the old Things to do setup and moving travel advertisers into Search campaigns with AI Max. I have been moving campaigns across by hand in accounts I manage. The new setup returns real controls: the search terms report, ad groups you own, feed filtering per ad group, and locations of interest.

I wrote a full guide to the migration and every new control: Google Ads for Things to do, from PMax to Search with AI Max. If your tours run on PMax today, that guide is the practical next step.

What to do this month

1. Look at where your PMax spend actually goes by channel: search, YouTube, display and the rest. If nearly all of it is search, you are paying a black-box premium for something a Search campaign does with more control
2. Look for your brand name in the search categories, and set up brand exclusions if they are missing
3. Open every asset group and check the final URL. Ads about a specific tour should land on that tour
4. Check your listing groups. One undivided bucket means the feed is deciding your structure for you
5. Reconcile the campaign's conversions against your booking system before trusting any of its numbers
6. If you sell tours and activities, plan the move to Search with AI Max campaign by campaign, not in one weekend

Common questions

Should a tour operator use Performance Max in 2026?

For Things to do inventory, Google is moving the product itself toward Search with AI Max. New investment in PMax structure has a short shelf life. Where PMax stays in the mix, it needs brand exclusions, segmented listing groups and a booking-system reconciliation before its numbers steer budget.

How do I stop PMax spending on my brand name?

Configure brand exclusions on the campaign, then verify in the search category insights that your name and its misspellings stop appearing. Verification matters, because changes in PMax do not always show up as fast as you expect.

Can I see search terms in Performance Max?

Not at query level. You get grouped category insights, which is exactly why waste hides so well in PMax. Moving Things to do campaigns to Search with AI Max brings the full search terms report back.

Open your PMax channel breakdown and search categories this week. Twenty minutes with those two reports will tell you more about the campaign than the overview page ever has.