Google Will Let You Zero Out Search Partner Spend in PMax
Google Ads now lets Performance Max advertisers set Search Partner spend to zero. Ginny Marvin, who speaks for Google Ads on exactly this kind of thing, says the control works in the API right now. The help page, meanwhile, still lists it as coming soon. One of those is current. Guess which one most agencies are reading.
This matters for apartment leasing because PMax has always been a bit of a black box, and Search partner inventory is the part nobody wants to talk about. It's not Google Search. It's not the Display Network you'd recognize. It's a grab bag of third-party sites that run Google's search results, and the traffic quality on it has a reputation for being soft. Soft traffic costs the same per click as the good stuff. It just converts worse, which means your cost-per-lease absorbs the difference quietly, campaign after campaign, with no line item that says "this part was a waste."
If a channel cap now exists and your PMax campaigns are still running with Search partners at default, that's not a platform limitation anymore. That's a setting nobody checked.
The useful move here isn't panicking about PMax. It's finding out whether your account has the option and whether anyone's used it.
- 01Can you confirm whether Search partner spend is currently set above 0% on our PMax campaigns, and if so, what percentage?
- 02Have you accessed this control through the API, or are you waiting on it to show up in the Google Ads UI?
- 03What share of our PMax spend over the last 90 days went to Search partners versus Google Search and Display directly?
- 04If we cap Search partners at 0%, what's your estimate for the change in our cost-per-lead and cost-per-lease, and how will you isolate that from normal seasonality?
- 05Who on your team is actually watching Google Ads API changelogs versus the public help center, and how often?
Source: PPC Land, October 17, 2026
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