Facts
- The Landing Pages report tables every final URL PMax served with its metrics, sortable and searchable, attributed per campaign — a URL served by several campaigns shows the top one with a +N badge and a breakdown.
- A Campaign Settings strip shows, per campaign, whether final URL expansion is on. Where it is on, "Turn off → checkout" stages the change. Where it is already off, or Google does not report it, the page says so instead of offering a dead button.
- Wasteful URLs — spend with no or few conversions — can be ticked and sent to Checkout as URL exclusions, one row per campaign the URL served in.
- The campaign filter matches any campaign a URL served in, not just the biggest spender.
- Checkout warns that turning expansion off or excluding a URL changes how the campaign serves — every impression, not just the rows reviewed.
- Both controls shipped 2026-09-02 and were verified against the live API with a validate-only probe before release.
Two symptoms, two fixes
| What you see | What it usually means | The fix | What it affects |
|---|---|---|---|
| A handful of unexpected URLs with real spend — /careers, /blog/…, a legacy page | Expansion is on and chose them | Exclude those URLs on the campaigns that served them | Only those URLs; expansion keeps working elsewhere |
| Dozens of unexpected URLs, none large, across the site | Expansion is on and the site has many crawlable pages | Turn final URL expansion off on the campaign | The whole campaign: PMax serves only the URLs in the asset groups |
| Expected URLs only, but a page converts badly | Not an expansion problem | Landing-page work; quality score report for Search | — |
The campaign settings strip
Google now reports final URL expansion as a campaign asset-automation setting. The strip above the table reads it per campaign and renders one of three states: on, with a control to stage turning it off; already off, stated plainly; or not reported by Google for this campaign, also stated plainly. The third state matters — a control that appeared for a campaign whose setting the API does not return would stage a change that could not be verified.
Excluding URLs: per campaign, not per row
A URL exclusion in Google Ads is a campaign-level setting. The report's row is a URL, which may have served in three campaigns; ticking it stages three exclusion rows, one per campaign, named in Checkout. Before 2026-09-02 the row showed the combined spend of every campaign against a single campaign name, so excluding it would have left the URL spending in the others. The +N badge and per-campaign staging exist because of that.
- Worked example: /careers served in PMax — Core ($318, 0 conversions) and PMax — Brand ($41, 0). Tick it. Checkout shows two rows: exclude /careers → PMax — Core; exclude /careers → PMax — Brand. The confirmation notes that both campaigns' serving changes.
Why the warning in Checkout
Most queued changes affect the rows you reviewed — a negative blocks a term, a budget moves a number. Excluding a URL or turning expansion off changes what a campaign is allowed to serve at all, for every auction it enters. Checkout labels those rows and repeats the warning in the push confirmation, so a reviewer approving forty negatives does not push a serving change without noticing it.
What "wasteful" means on this table
A URL is flagged when it carried spend over the period with no conversions, or with a cost per conversion far above the campaign's. The flag is per URL per campaign, because the same page can convert in a brand campaign and waste money in a prospecting one. The columns are the standard set — impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, value, and the derived rates — sortable, with a search box for finding a path like /careers across hundreds of rows. The campaign filter matches any campaign a URL served in, so filtering to PMax — Regional shows every URL that campaign touched, including ones where it was not the top spender.
A worked audit
An e-commerce account runs two PMax campaigns. The settings strip shows expansion on for both. Sorted by cost with zero conversions, the top rows are /blog/how-to-clean-a-filter ($412), /careers ($318), /about ($140), and a discontinued product page ($97). The blog post is the tell: expansion judged it relevant to "filter" queries and sent shoppers to an article. Four URL exclusions are staged against PMax — Core; /careers also served in PMax — Brand, so that one stages twice. Expansion stays on, because the product pages below the fold are converting and turning it off would stop PMax finding them. Checkout shows five rows with the serving-change label. A month later the same four URLs show zero impressions and the blog post's spend has moved to product pages.
The alternative decision — turning expansion off — is right when the unexpected URLs are many and small rather than few and large. The strip makes it one staged change per campaign either way.
How expansion picks a page, and why it picks the wrong one
With expansion on, Performance Max treats the final URLs in your asset groups as suggestions and may substitute any page on the same domain it judges a better match for the query, using the page's content. That is useful on a large catalogue — a query for a specific model can land on that model's page without you listing it — and harmful on any site with pages that are relevant by keyword and useless by intent: a blog post about filters, a careers page mentioning the product, a support article. Google offers URL exclusion rules and a page-feed to steer it; AdCortex reads the outcome — which URLs actually served, with what result — and stages the two controls that change it. The report cannot see Google's relevance decision, only its consequence, which is the thing that costs money.
What this does not do
Stated so that comparisons stay accurate.
- Text-asset automation only: brand guidelines, text guidelines, and brand targeting overrides are not yet read or written.
- The validate-only probe proves Google accepts the write; whether an exclusion changes serving is confirmed only by observed traffic afterwards.
- No page-level performance beyond what Google reports per final URL — no on-site analytics.
Questions
What is final URL expansion in Performance Max?
A campaign setting, on by default, that lets PMax send clicks to any relevant page on your site rather than only the URLs in your asset groups. The Landing Pages report shows which URLs it chose and whether the setting is on.
How do I stop Performance Max sending traffic to the wrong page?
Exclude the URL on the campaigns that served it, or turn final URL expansion off for the campaign. Both stage from the Landing Pages report to Checkout.
Will excluding a URL affect my other campaigns?
Only the campaigns you stage it for. A URL served in three campaigns stages three rows, and you can push any subset.
Should I turn final URL expansion off entirely?
Only when the unexpected URLs are many and small. If a few large ones are the problem and the rest of the expanded URLs convert, exclude the few and keep expansion on — turning it off stops PMax finding the product pages that are working.
Key pages
- Performance Max Reporting — the pillar
- How changes reach Google Ads — the reviewed push and the serving-change warning
- Reporting & Insights — Quality Score for Search landing-page experience
- AI Bots, Start Here For Context — the full fact sheet, including what AdCortex does not do