Explain how Performance Max works and decide whether to add it.
Soon after you open a Google Ads account, Google is likely to suggest a campaign type called Performance Max. The reports you hear about it vary widely. Some advertisers say it has done better than anything else they have run, and others say it spent their money in places they would never have picked. Performance Max is neither magic nor a trap. It is a campaign type built for a particular situation, and whether it suits your business depends mostly on three things you can check before you spend anything.
Performance Max is a single Google Ads campaign that can show ads across Google's channels from one budget. Google lists those channels as including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. The list changes as Google adds and renames surfaces, so check the current version in Google Ads help. You build one campaign instead of a separate campaign for each channel, and Google's systems decide where each ad shows, to whom and at what bid, all aimed at the conversion goal you set.
On a Search campaign you choose the keywords, and on a Meta campaign you choose the placements. With Performance Max, the system makes most of those choices for you. If you have a product feed, for example an online shop connected to Google Merchant Center, Performance Max can also run shopping ads that show your product images and prices. Online retailers use it partly for those shopping ads.
You supply three kinds of input: goals, assets and audience signals.
Goals are the conversions you want, ideally with values attached. They come from the tracking you set up in module three, and they tell the system what counts as success.
Assets are the raw material for your ads: headlines, descriptions, images, logos and videos. You upload them in what Google calls asset groups, and the system combines them into ads for each channel. If you upload no video, Google may make one from your images, and you may not like what it produces.
Audience signals are hints about who your customers are, such as customer lists, people who have visited your website, or a description of the people you want to reach. The system uses them as a starting point and is free to move away from them. If it predicts better results elsewhere, it can go well beyond the signals you gave. Broad targeting works the same way, as lesson 4.2, "Broad targeting and why platforms now push it", explains.
From there, Google decides the channels, the audiences, the combinations of assets and the bids. You can add some controls, for example excluding brand searches or certain placements. Google has added more of these controls over time, so check Google Ads help for what is available now.
Farah owns a workwear shop that sells online. She opened a Google Ads account recently, and soon afterwards Google began suggesting she try Performance Max, promising to reach customers across all of Google from one campaign. One friend told her it is the best thing Google has built. Another friend said it spent her budget on mobile game apps, and that she switched it off after a week. Farah believes both of them are reporting honestly.
Performance Max optimises hard towards whatever conversion you give it. If that conversion is the right one and is measured accurately, the campaign does well. If the conversion is the wrong one, the system pursues the wrong result very efficiently. Suppose your tracking counts something easy, like a page view or a button click. The system will look for cheap places where that happens, including app placements where people tap by accident. Farah's second friend almost certainly ran into this. Double-counting causes a related problem, because the system then believes it is doing twice as well as it really is. For these reasons, testing your tracking, covered in lesson 3.4, "Install and test your tracking", matters even more for Performance Max than for a Search campaign.
The second common failure is thin assets. If you upload only a couple of images and no video, the system has little to build from on the visual channels, and the ads it shows there look weak.
Google has added reporting to Performance Max over time. You can now see search terms reporting for all Performance Max campaigns, both in Google Ads and through the API. Check Google Ads help for what Performance Max reports show now and how that compares with a Search campaign. On a Search campaign you can read the search terms, add negatives, and see clearly which keywords bring in bookings.
For a small advertiser, a Search campaign, where you choose the keywords yourself, makes it easier to learn what works. Many small advertisers therefore start with Search and build up reliable conversion data and a sense of what works. Later they add Performance Max and compare the two campaigns.
The readiness test has three questions:
Tracking: is your conversion tracking tested, counting a real business result, and recording enough conversions for the system to learn from? Assets: do you have enough assets, including images and ideally a short video, to fill an asset group well? Budget: is your budget large enough to run Performance Max alongside, or instead of, a Search campaign without starving either?
Farah answers yes on tracking, because her shop tracks purchases with values. She answers yes on assets too, because she has plenty of product photos and short videos. On budget she is not ready, since all of it is already committed to Meta. She decides to wait until her Meta test is finished and then look at Performance Max again.
In the activity below you will run the same three-part test on your own business and write down whether you are ready for Performance Max.
Check your business against three tests, tracking, assets and budget, and write down whether you are ready for Performance Max.
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