Google has updated its Performance Max help documentation to confirm that Waze Ads are now available across select global markets - expanding beyond what was previously a US-only placement. That update is a practical signal for any advertiser running PMax campaigns in the UK or elsewhere across those 42 newly included countries. A new placement type is now active inside your campaigns, whether you planned for it or not.
What Waze Ads Actually Are Inside PMax
Waze is a navigation app owned by Google. Its ad formats are location-anchored - they appear while users are actively driving or planning a route. Branded pins, search promotions, and takeover ads are the core formats. The intent context is different from a standard search query: a user is physically in transit, often looking for nearby destinations or making fast decisions about where to stop.
Inside Performance Max, Waze sits alongside Google Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps as part of the full inventory pool. Google's automation decides how to distribute budget across these channels based on conversion signals. Waze does not appear as a separate line item you configure - it is folded into PMax's broader inventory, and Google's bidding logic determines when it shows your ads there.
That structure matters. You are not choosing to run Waze Ads; you are choosing to run PMax, and Waze is now part of what that means in the UK and other newly eligible markets. The question is not whether to adopt the format, but whether you have thought through the implications for campaigns already live.
Who This Actually Affects
The obvious use case is local and physical businesses - retailers, restaurants, automotive dealers, petrol stations, service businesses with fixed locations. For these advertisers, Waze inventory adds genuine intent-proximity value. A user routing to a town centre and seeing a branded pin for a nearby showroom or service centre is a reasonable fit. The placement reinforces physical presence at exactly the moment someone is moving around.
Lead generation advertisers and B2B accounts are a different story. If your PMax campaigns are driving enquiries for professional services, financial products, or SaaS, Waze inventory is unlikely to produce useful conversion data. It may spend budget on impressions that have no meaningful relationship to your conversion goals. PMax will learn from whatever signals it receives, and poor-quality placements feed poor-quality signals back into Smart Bidding over time.
E-commerce accounts fall somewhere in between. If you are selling products that have a genuine impulse or location component - think food delivery, local services, click and collect - Waze could contribute usefully. If your products require considered research and have no physical touchpoint, the placement is noise rather than signal.
The Placement Exclusion Question
Performance Max does not give advertisers a direct Waze toggle. You cannot simply turn the placement off from a settings menu. Placement-level exclusions in PMax are limited by design - Google has been deliberately restrictive about what can be excluded, and Waze inventory is not surfaced as a standard exclusion option in the same way that, say, specific Display URLs might be.
What you can do is monitor. Check your asset group performance data and watch for any anomalies after Waze inventory becomes active in your market. If you see CPA increases without corresponding volume gains, or if impression share shifts in ways you cannot explain through search trends, Waze inventory changes are worth investigating as a contributing factor.
For campaigns where placement quality is genuinely critical - typically high-value lead gen with tight CPA targets - this is a reason to review your conversion tracking setup. If Waze impressions lead to store visits rather than form fills, and your PMax conversion action is a web form, the campaign may be spending budget on a placement that generates a positive behavioural signal (a store visit) but no conversion event in your setup. That disconnect can distort bidding.
Conversion Tracking Implications
Waze inventory creates a channel that is more likely to drive physical action than digital conversion. If you are not tracking store visits or offline conversions through Google Ads, you have a measurement gap. Budget spent through Waze placements in PMax may produce genuine downstream value - a customer walks into your branch, calls your number, or visits your location days later - but without offline conversion imports or store visit tracking, Smart Bidding sees nothing.
This is not a new problem with PMax, but Waze makes it more acute for location-relevant businesses. If you are a retail or hospitality advertiser who has not yet connected your Google Ads account to any form of offline or store visit conversion data, the expansion of Waze inventory is a reasonable prompt to address that gap. Smart Bidding optimises towards what it can measure. If physical visits are the actual commercial outcome, they need to be in the conversion data.
What to Do Now
First, audit which of your PMax campaigns are running in markets now covered by Waze Ads. If you are running UK campaigns, you are affected. Review the campaign goals and ask whether Waze-style, location-proximity intent is actually relevant to the conversion actions you are optimising for.
Second, check your conversion action setup. Are you measuring everything that Waze inventory might plausibly drive? Store visit conversions, phone call conversions, and any offline events connected via the Google Ads offline import or enhanced conversions for leads should all be reviewed. If these are missing and your business has a physical component, the Waze expansion makes the gap more consequential.
Third, if you are a lead gen advertiser with no physical locations and tight CPA targets, treat this as a monitoring task rather than an action point right now. Keep an eye on PMax performance in the weeks following the rollout in your region. If performance degrades without explanation, dig into asset group data and impression share shifts before assuming the cause is bidding or creative.
The broader point is this: Performance Max keeps expanding its inventory footprint, and each expansion changes the implicit contract between the platform and the advertiser. Waze going global is not disruptive on its own. But it is another reminder that PMax campaigns require active oversight - because Google will always have more places to spend your budget, and not all of them will suit your goals.