One campaign across Google's channels.
It can do a lot of the work. It still needs someone checking where the results come from.
Performance Max is a single campaign that runs across Google's channels: Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Instead of building separate ads for each, you provide headlines, descriptions, images and videos, and Google combines them into ads for each placement.
Conversion goals, audience signals and search themes guide the campaign, and Google's bidding decides where and when each ad shows. For online stores, it can also use a Merchant Center product feed.
Google makes more of the decisions, so what goes into the campaign matters more.
Built around your products, services or audiences, so each group's assets and signals match what it promotes.
Headlines, descriptions, images and videos for each asset group, with weak ones replaced based on asset reporting.
Customer lists and website visitors, used as signals for Google, not fixed targeting.
Added to show Google which searches matter to the business.
For online stores, feed data kept accurate, since it shapes which products show and for what.
Only the actions that matter to your business counted as conversions, with values where they differ.
Targets set from conversion data and adjusted as results come in.
Brand exclusions and negative keywords to keep Performance Max off searches it shouldn't be taking.
Channel, asset, product and search-term reports, read alongside your actual sales or enquiries.
Reports showing more conversions than your business received, often from counting actions that don't matter.
Actions recorded on Google's own platforms added to results, without being checked against your real sales or enquiries.
Products or services lumped in together, so the ones that sell carry the ones that don't.
Performance Max and other campaigns going after the same people, making it hard to tell which is doing the work.
Product data problems that stop items appearing, or show them inaccurately.
Results seen as one total, with little view of which channels or products are driving them.
Wrong conversion tracking, weak assets or poor product data sending Google's automation in the wrong direction.
Businesses with reliable conversion tracking and enough conversion data for Google's bidding to work from, including ecommerce and lead generation. It can run alongside Search and Shopping, or carry more of the account where it makes sense.
Only partly. You can shape where ads show through assets, audience signals, brand exclusions, negative keywords and placement exclusions. Channel reporting shows where results are coming from.
It can run alongside Search. When a search is identical to a keyword in a Search campaign, the Search campaign generally takes priority. Whether Performance Max should replace Search, sit beside it or not be used at all depends on the account.
Reliable conversion tracking, enough conversion data to learn from, and good assets. For online stores, a well-kept product feed too.
Nothing changes in your account without your say. You get the findings, and you decide what happens next.
Platapode specialises in Google Ads.
Based in Sydney, NSW, working with businesses across Australia and overseas.
