Should I hire an agency specifically for Performance Max, or can Smart Bidding run itself?

Smart Bidding is genuinely good. On a small account it will do roughly what a person would do, because there is not much room to do anything else. With only a handful of sales a month, there is no pattern for an operator to spot that the algorithm has not already found.

So we set a practical floor of around 5,000 euros a month in ad spend before we take an account on. Below it, Smart Bidding does not get enough conversion data to run Performance Max well, and the fee starts eating the media budget you actually need. That is our own rule, and it costs us clients every month.

Smart Bidding only optimizes what it is fed. It cannot fix what goes into it. That is where the work actually lives.

It cannot tell you your tracking broke, so it keeps bidding on sales it can no longer see. It cannot write a product title that matches what people search. It cannot clean a feed that Merchant Center is quietly disapproving. It cannot decide that a product should not be pushed at all. Feed, tracking and structure are the inputs. Bidding is just the output, and it is the one part Google already automated.

Fees drop as spend grows. Ours start at 10 percent on the first 10,000 euros of monthly spend, then step down to 9, 8, 7, and 6 percent through each higher bracket.

So a small account pays close to the top rate for the least room to improve, which is exactly the wrong trade. A bigger account pays a lower percentage on a bigger pot where feed and tracking work moves real money. If an agency pitches you Performance Max management and your spend is under the floor, ask what they will change that Smart Bidding is not already doing. If the answer is bidding, you do not need them.