Service, by platform
Performance Max management: when it helps, and when it hides waste
Performance Max runs one campaign across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps and reports them as one number. It helps a retailer with a clean feed, real conversion values and volume; it hides waste on a lead-generation account with under thirty conversions a month, where the spend drifts to Display placements and to your own brand name. We manage it on the Growth tier at £399 a month, always next to a Search campaign, never instead of one.
When it helps
- An online shop with a feed of hundreds or thousands of products, purchase values tracked, and enough orders a month for the bidding to learn from.
- A business whose Search campaigns are already clean and capped by impression share, so the next customer has to come from somewhere other than the searches you already win.
- A local business that wants to appear in Maps and on YouTube around its area without building three campaigns to do it.
- An account with a proper asset library: real photos, a short video, headlines and descriptions written per product line rather than one set for everything.
When it hides waste
- A lead-generation account counting form fills at no value, where the campaign optimises for the cheapest form fill it can find, often spam from a Display placement.
- An account with no brand exclusions, where the campaign takes the searches for your own name and reports them as its win.
- A budget under a thousand pounds a month split with Search, where PMax starves the campaign that would have told you what people typed.
- A business that needs to know which searches brought the leads, because a category-level insight is not a Search Terms report.
The controls
Five settings that turn a black box into a campaign you can run
Performance Max was built to be left alone. The controls that matter were added afterwards, most of them since 2023, and an account set up before then, or set up by the wizard, usually has none of them.
- 1
Brand exclusions
Your own brand, and any brand you resell but do not want PMax claiming, added as a brand list at campaign level. This is the single change that most often halves a PMax campaign's apparent performance and doubles its honesty.
- 2
Search themes
Up to 25 per asset group, telling the campaign which searches you mean. They guide rather than restrict, so the Search campaign still holds the exact-match keywords for the money terms.
- 3
Asset groups by product line or service
One group per thing you sell, each with its own images, video, headlines, descriptions and audience signal built from your converters, not one group for the whole business.
- 4
Negatives and placements
Campaign-level negative keywords, placement exclusions for the app and game inventory, final URL expansion switched off so the campaign lands on the pages we chose.
- 5
Reporting that splits the channels
A script that reads the campaign's spend by Search, Shopping, Display, Video and Discover each week, so the report can say where the money went and whether it is coming back.
Performance Max next to Search
What we run in each situation
| Situation | What we run | Why |
|---|---|---|
| New lead-generation account, any budget | Search only, phrase and exact match, conversions proven first | There is no data for PMax to learn from and no way to read where it spent |
| Lead generation with 30 or more conversions a month and values set | Search for the money terms, PMax with brand excluded and search themes, a shared negative list | PMax finds the customers Search cannot reach, and the exclusions keep it honest |
| Online shop, under a few hundred products | Standard Shopping with priorities, Search for brand and category, PMax tested against Shopping on one product line | Standard Shopping shows its search terms; the test proves whether PMax adds sales or moves them |
| Online shop, large feed, strong conversion values | PMax as the main Shopping engine with asset groups by category, Search for brand and top models, remarketing folded in | Volume is what PMax needs, and the feed gives it something real to optimise |
| Budget under £1,000 a month | Search, and nothing else until impression share says Search is saturated | Splitting a small budget teaches neither campaign anything |
How we judge it
Incrementality, not the campaign's own report
The question is never whether Performance Max reports conversions; it always does. The question is whether the account has more customers with it than without it, at a cost per customer you would accept. We answer that with brand exclusions in place, by comparing total account conversions in the weeks before and after, and by pausing it for a fortnight when the numbers are ambiguous. If total conversions do not fall when PMax is paused, it was moving conversions rather than making them, and the budget goes back to Search.
Related
Where this connects
Shopping ads management
The feed and the Standard Shopping structure PMax is compared against.
Google Ads management
The Search campaign that runs alongside, and the weekly routine.
Pricing
Performance Max is managed on the Growth tier and above.
Get a quote
Your conversions a month and your spend decide whether PMax belongs.
Questions about Performance Max
Google's rep told me to move everything to Performance Max. Should I?
Not everything, and not on a lead-generation account with under thirty conversions a month. Performance Max needs conversion volume and real values to bid well, and it reports the channels together, so on a small account you cannot tell whether the leads came from Search or from a Display placement inside a game. Keep Search, add PMax where the data supports it, and read both.
Why does PMax look so much better than my Search campaign?
Usually because it is taking the brand searches. Without brand exclusions, PMax shows on your own name, which converts at several times the rate of anything else, and the campaign reports that as its own result. Set the exclusions and the comparison becomes honest, which is often a surprise.
Can you see search terms in Performance Max?
Partly. The search terms insights report groups queries into categories, and since 2024 campaign-level negative keywords and brand exclusions give some control. It is not the line-by-line Search Terms report of a Search campaign, which is one reason we keep a Search campaign running alongside it.
Do I need video for Performance Max?
If you do not supply one Google generates a video from your images and text, and it is usually poor. A short phone-shot clip of the product or the team, cut to fifteen seconds, is enough to stop the auto-generated one from serving, and we ask for it in the first week.
Is Performance Max included in the monthly fee?
Yes, on the Growth tier at £399 a month and above. It is set up as part of the account setup where the numbers justify it, and it is never the only campaign in the account.
Running Performance Max and not sure what it is doing? Ask for the channel split.
Send the account ID. The reply tells you how much of the campaign's spend went to Display and to your own brand, and what we would change.