Google shows where Performance Max spends. Read it on margin, not on conversion value.
Performance Max now reports by channel — Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover, Maps and search partners — and since late September Search campaigns ignore the language setting. What both mean for a European store’s ad numbers.
For most of its life Performance Max was one number: you gave it a budget and it told you what came back, across every Google surface at once. That has changed. Google now reports where the money went, channel by channel — and it changed how Search campaigns choose a language. Both matter for a store selling across Europe.
The channel performance report
In Google Ads, under Campaigns → Insights and reports → Channel performance, a Performance Max campaign now shows its results across Google Search, the Display Network, YouTube, Discover, Maps, Gmail and search partners. It reports impressions, clicks, interactions, conversions, conversion value and cost, with a summary, a channels-to-goals chart and a distribution table. Any date range from 6 June 2025 can be viewed.
Google announced channel-level segments for Performance Max to developers on 29 January 2026, so the same split is available to reporting tools that read the Google Ads API.
Why conversion value is the wrong column to rank by
The report ranks channels on what Google can see: conversions and conversion value. Conversion value is whatever your store reports as an order’s value — for many stores the order total, which for a European store includes the VAT inside the price. A channel that brings €4,000 of value has not earned €4,000.
Example, with a 21% VAT rate and a store that keeps 45% of its ex-VAT revenue before ads: Search spends €1,000 and reports €4,000 of value → €4,000 ÷ 1.21 × 45% = €1,488 kept → 1.49× on margin. Display spends €500 and reports €900 → €900 ÷ 1.21 × 45% = €335 → 0.67× on margin: it loses money while still showing 1.8× ROAS.
The useful reading of the new report is therefore one step further: take each channel’s value out of VAT, apply what an order keeps before ads, and divide by the spend. Above 1.0× the channel pays for itself; below it, every euro spent there costs more than a euro.
Language is matched automatically on Search
Since late September 2026, campaign-level language targeting no longer applies to Search and AI Max for Search campaigns, nor to the Google Search part of Performance Max. Ads are matched using signals that include the language of the ad and the landing page, the search terms and the user’s language settings. The other Performance Max channels — YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail — still follow the language you set.
For a store that sells in several languages, the setting that used to keep a German ad away from French searches is gone. What keeps them apart now is the ad copy and the landing page. Make sure each language has its own ads and a landing page in the same language, and check the search terms report in the first weeks for searches in a language you did not write for.
What it does to the figure that stays
Neither change touches your orders. Both change how easily a channel can look profitable without being so. Profflow reads spend from your ad accounts day by day and works out return on ad spend on margin — after VAT, cost of goods and fees — per channel, so the channel that shows 1.8× in the ad platform and 0.67× after costs is visible as the second one.
