You will be able to explain how Performance Max works and decide whether to add it.
Soon after Farah opened a Google Ads account for her workwear shop, Google started suggesting she try Performance Max. The suggestion came with the promise of reaching customers across all of Google from one campaign. A friend told her it was the best thing Google had built. Another friend said it had spent her budget on mobile game apps and she had switched it off after a week, and as far as Farah could tell, both of them were reporting honestly.
Performance Max is neither magic nor a trap. It is a campaign type built for a particular situation, and whether it suits you depends mostly on three things you can check before you spend.
Performance Max is a single Google Ads campaign that can show your ads across Google's channels from one budget. Google lists these as including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Check the current list in Google Ads help, because it changes as Google adds and renames surfaces.
Instead of building separate campaigns for each channel, you build one. Google's systems then decide where each ad shows, to whom and at what bid, all in pursuit of the conversion goal you set. Where a Search campaign lets you choose keywords and a Meta campaign lets you choose placements, Performance Max makes most of those choices itself.
For a business with a product feed, such as an online shop connected to Google Merchant Center, Performance Max can also show shopping ads with product images and prices. That is one reason it is popular with online retailers like Farah.
You supply three kinds of input.
Goals are the conversions you want, ideally with values, from the tracking you set up in module three. They tell the system what success looks like.
Assets are the raw material for the ads, the headlines, descriptions, images, logos and videos you upload in what Google calls asset groups, which the system mixes into ads for each channel. If you supply no video, Google may create one from your images, and you may not like the result.
Audience signals are hints about who your customers are, such as your customer lists, website visitors or descriptions of the people you want to reach. Treat them as a starting point that the system is free to leave. As with the broad targeting in lesson 4.2, Broad targeting and why platforms now push it, the system can go well beyond them if it predicts better results elsewhere.
Google then decides the channels, the audiences, the combinations of assets and the bids. You can add some controls, such as excluding brand searches or certain placements, and these options have expanded over time; check what is currently available in Google Ads help.
Performance Max optimises hard towards whatever conversion you give it. If the conversion is right and measured accurately, that is its strength. If it is wrong, it chases the wrong thing very efficiently.
Farah's second friend almost certainly hit this. If tracking counts something easy, such as a page view or a click on a button, the system finds cheap places where that happens, such as placements in apps where people tap by accident. If tracking is double-counting, the system thinks it is doing twice as well as it is. Lesson 3.4, Install and test your tracking, matters even more here than for a Search campaign.
Thin assets cause the other common failure. With only a couple of images and no video, the system has little to work with on visual channels, and ads there look weak.
Reporting is the main trade-off. Performance Max shows less detail than a Search campaign about which searches, placements and audiences brought results. Google has added more reporting over time, but you still see far less than you would on a Search campaign about where the money went.
For a small advertiser, that makes learning harder. A Search campaign shows you the search terms, lets you add negatives and makes it clear which keywords bring bookings. So many small advertisers run Search first, build up reliable conversion data and a sense of what works, then add Performance Max later and compare.
That gives you a simple readiness test with three questions. Is your conversion tracking tested, counting a real business result, and recording enough conversions for the system to learn from? Do you have enough assets, including images and ideally a short video, to fill an asset group well? Is your budget large enough to run it alongside, or instead of, a Search campaign without starving either?
Farah could answer yes to the first two, because her shop tracks purchases with values and she has plenty of product photos and short videos. Her budget was another matter, since all of it was already committed to Meta, so she decided to wait until her Meta test was finished and revisit the question then.
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.
Write down whether your business is ready for Performance Max, using tracking, assets and budget as the test.
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