Performance Max Campaigns: What PMax Is, When to Use It, and How to Set Up, Control and Optimise It

Performance Max is the campaign type Google pushes hardest, and the one advertisers argue about most. Run well, it finds conversions across Google's inventory that a Search campaign alone never reaches. Run badly, it spends the budget on brand searches you would have won anyway and display placements nobody asked for, and the reporting makes that hard to see.

The difference between those two outcomes is almost never the campaign type itself. It is the inputs: conversion tracking, assets, signals, exclusions, and the discipline to judge the campaign on the right numbers. This guide covers all of them.

Quick answer: Performance Max (PMax) is a Google Ads campaign type that runs one campaign across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You give it a conversion goal, a budget, creative assets and optional audience signals; Google's AI decides where to show ads, what to bid and which asset combinations to serve. It suits businesses with reliable conversion tracking and enough conversion volume, especially e-commerce with a product feed, lead generation with qualified-lead tracking, and businesses with physical stores. It is a poor fit for tiny budgets, low-volume accounts and businesses that cannot measure what a good conversion is.

Key takeaways

• What it is: one goal-based campaign that bids across all Google Ads channels using Smart Bidding.
• What it needs: accurate conversion tracking, a budget that allows learning, strong assets and, for retail, a clean Merchant Center feed.
• Who it suits: e-commerce, lead generation with offline or qualified-lead data, and multi-location or store-based businesses.
• Main risks: spend drifting to brand searches, remarketing and low-quality placements, optimisation towards cheap but worthless conversions, and less visibility than Search.
• What you control: goals, bidding, budget, locations, languages, schedule, assets, search themes, audience signals, negative keywords, brand exclusions, URL expansion, placement and demographic exclusions, device targeting and the product feed.
• What to measure: conversion value and ROAS or CPA, lead quality, new versus returning customers, channel mix, search terms, and asset group and product performance.

What is a Performance Max campaign?

A Performance Max campaign is a single Google Ads campaign that uses Google's AI to find conversions across all of Google's advertising channels at once. Google describes it as "a goal-based campaign type" that gives access to all Google Ads inventory from one campaign (Google Ads Help).

Instead of building separate Search, Display, YouTube and Shopping campaigns, you build one PMax campaign made of asset groups. Each asset group holds headlines, descriptions, images, logos and videos, a final URL, and optional signals about who your customers are. Google mixes those assets into ads for each channel, and Smart Bidding sets a bid for every auction based on how likely it is to lead to a conversion.

PMax launched to all advertisers in November 2021, and in 2022 Google upgraded Smart Shopping and Local campaigns into it. For online retailers, that makes it the default way to run Shopping ads with automation.

Where do Performance Max ads show?

PMax ads can appear on:

• Google Search and search partners, including text ads and Shopping ads
• Google Shopping, when a Merchant Center feed is linked
• YouTube, in-stream, in-feed and Shorts
• Google Display Network, across websites and apps
• Discover, Gmail and Google Maps

You do not choose the channels. Google allocates budget to whichever channel it predicts will convert. What you can now do is see where it went, through the channel performance report, and exclude placements and searches you do not want.

Which businesses should use Performance Max?

Performance Max works best for businesses with reliable conversion tracking, enough conversions for the AI to learn from, and a clear value for each conversion. Not every business needs it, and some are better without it.

So, no, not every business should use Performance Max. Most accounts that do well with it pair it with a Search campaign on the most important keywords rather than replacing Search entirely.

What can you market with Performance Max?

• Physical products, through a Merchant Center product feed (Shopping, dynamic remarketing and product-led ads)
• Services and lead generation, such as home services, clinics, education, finance, real estate and B2B
• Store and branch visits, for retail chains, restaurants, showrooms and dealerships
• Travel, including hotels and holiday packages
• Bookings and subscriptions, such as tours, events, memberships and SaaS sign-ups
• Online sales without a feed, where a single landing page or offer is the conversion

Everything must still comply with Google Ads policies. Restricted categories such as gambling, financial services and healthcare have extra certification or targeting limits that apply to PMax as well.

What are the benefits of Performance Max?

• Reach across every Google channel from one campaign. Customers who never type your keyword can still be reached on YouTube, Discover or Gmail.
• Real-time bidding on every auction. Smart Bidding uses signals such as device, location, time, language and browsing context that no manual bid can match.
• Creative built for each format automatically. One set of assets becomes search ads, display banners, YouTube videos and Discover cards.
• Strong for e-commerce. Shopping, dynamic remarketing and new-customer prospecting run together, driven by the product feed.
• Finds new converting searches. PMax can match to relevant queries you never added as keywords.
• Less day-to-day management. Time moves from adjusting bids to improving inputs: tracking, feed, creative and offer.

What are the risks of Performance Max?

• Brand cannibalisation. PMax can take credit for searches on your own brand name that you would have won cheaply, inflating its results.
• Remarketing inflation. It can spend on people already about to buy, such as site visitors and existing customers, which looks efficient but adds little new revenue.
• Optimising for the wrong conversion. If a page view, a click to call or a spam form fill counts as a conversion, PMax will find plenty of those.
• Low-quality placements. Display and app inventory can deliver accidental clicks and junk leads, especially for lead generation.
• Less transparency than Search. Reporting has improved, but you still see less than keyword-level Search data, and asset combinations are chosen for you.
• Overlap with Search campaigns. PMax and Search can compete for the same queries. Search takes priority only when the query exactly matches an exact match keyword.
• Slow feedback. Learning takes weeks, and frequent changes reset it.
• Automatically created assets. With automatic asset features on, Google may generate text, images or video from your site that you have not approved.

How do you create a Performance Max campaign?

To create a Performance Max campaign, choose a conversion-based objective, select Performance Max as the campaign type, set bidding and budget, configure campaign settings and exclusions, then build asset groups with assets, search themes and audience signals. Before you start, make sure conversion tracking is accurate. It is the single biggest factor in whether PMax works.

Step 1: Prepare tracking, feed and assets

• Check that the primary conversion actions are the ones that matter (sales, qualified leads, calls over a set duration) and that secondary actions are not set as primary.
• For e-commerce, link Google Merchant Center and fix disapproved products.
• Gather assets: images in landscape, square and portrait formats, your logo, at least one horizontal video, and ideally a vertical one for Shorts.

Step 2: Start the campaign and choose the objective

In Google Ads, click Create → Campaign, choose Sales, Leads or Local store visits, confirm the conversion goals, and select Performance Max. Link your Merchant Center account if you sell products.

Step 3: Set bidding and budget

• Choose Maximise conversions (optionally with a target CPA) for lead generation, or Maximise conversion value (optionally with a target ROAS) for e-commerce or when leads have different values.
• Start without a target, or with a realistic one based on existing data. A target set too tight will choke delivery.
• Set a budget that allows learning. A common rule of thumb is a daily budget of at least three times your target CPA.
• Turn on the customer acquisition goal if you want to bid only for new customers or bid higher for them.

Step 4: Configure campaign settings

• Locations and languages: target where customers are, using "presence" rather than "presence or interest" for local businesses.
• Ad schedule and device targeting, where they matter.
• Final URL expansion: turn it off, or add URL exclusions, if Google should only send traffic to the pages you choose.
• Brand exclusions: exclude your own brand if a separate brand Search campaign covers it, and exclude competitor brands if you do not want to appear on them.
• Negative keywords: add known irrelevant terms (jobs, free, DIY, competitor names you avoid).
• Automatically created assets: decide whether Google may generate text and media.

Step 5: Build asset groups

Build one asset group per product category, service or audience theme, each with its own final URL. For each:

• Text: up to 15 headlines of 30 characters, up to 5 long headlines of 90 characters, up to 5 descriptions of 90 characters (one of them 60 characters or fewer), and your business name.
• Images and logos: several landscape, square and portrait images, and square and landscape logos.
• Video: upload your own. If you do not, Google may generate one from your images, which rarely looks good.
• Search themes: add phrases describing what customers search for, to steer PMax on Search.
• Audience signals: add customer lists, website visitors, custom segments built from search terms and competitor sites, and interests. Signals guide the AI; they do not restrict it.
• Listing groups (retail): choose which products this asset group advertises.

Step 6: Publish, then leave it to learn

Publish, check that ads are approved, and avoid major changes for the first two to three weeks. Google's guidance is to allow roughly six weeks before judging a PMax campaign against another campaign type.

What can you control in Performance Max?

You control the inputs and the boundaries; Google controls the channel mix, individual bids and which asset combinations serve. The available controls have grown a lot since launch.

What you cannot do is choose a channel, set a bid per placement or keyword, or pick which asset combination runs where.

How do you optimise a Performance Max campaign?

Optimise Performance Max by improving what it learns from (conversions, feed, assets and signals) and by excluding what it should not spend on (irrelevant searches, placements, brand traffic and existing customers where that matters). Weekly checks, monthly structural changes.

1. Fix the conversion signal first. Optimise to sales or qualified leads, not all leads. For lead generation, import offline conversions or qualified-lead stages from your CRM and add conversion values that reflect lead quality.
2. Review search terms every week. Add irrelevant queries as negative keywords, and group the rest into themes to see where spend goes.
3. Separate brand traffic. Run brand in its own Search campaign and use brand exclusions in PMax, so PMax results show real new demand.
4. Check the channel performance report. If Display or YouTube takes a large share of spend with weak conversions, look at placements, assets and lead quality.
5. Exclude junk placements. Review where ads showed and exclude poor apps, sites and channels at account level.
6. Improve weak assets. Replace low-performing headlines and images, add proper video (horizontal and vertical), and keep assets tied to one product or service per asset group.
7. Split asset groups by theme, so each has relevant creative, search themes and a matching landing page.
8. Strengthen the feed (e-commerce). Better titles, accurate categories, high-quality images, competitive prices and custom labels for margin or bestsellers.
9. Separate products by performance. Put heroes, steady sellers and zombies (products that never get impressions) in different campaigns or listing groups, with budgets and targets to match.
10. Change targets gradually. Move target CPA or ROAS by about 10–20% at a time and wait for the result before moving again.
11. Use the customer acquisition goal if growth depends on new customers rather than repeat buyers.
12. Test with experiments. Use Google Ads experiments to compare PMax against Search or Shopping, or to test asset changes, instead of judging by before-and-after.

For a full account-level checklist, see our Google Ads audit SOP. If PMax brings clicks but no real enquiries, our guide on clicks with no leads covers the usual causes.

Which metrics should you check in Performance Max?

Judge Performance Max on business outcomes (profit, qualified leads, new customers), not on platform conversions alone.

• Conversions and conversion value: are they real sales or qualified leads, and do they match your CRM or store data?
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) for lead generation, and return on ad spend (ROAS) for e-commerce, compared with your break-even point.
• Conversion rate: a sharp rise can mean spam or a mis-firing tag, not success.
• Lead quality: the share of PMax leads that become qualified or closed deals.
• New versus returning customers: how much is genuine new business.
• Channel mix from the channel performance report: spend and conversions by Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
• Search terms and search categories: how much spend goes to your brand, competitors and irrelevant searches.
• Asset group performance: which themes and landing pages drive results.
• Asset performance: which headlines, images and videos convert.
• Product performance (retail): products with spend but no sales, and products with no impressions.
• Budget status: whether the campaign is "limited by budget" or held back by an overly tight target.
• Cost per click and click-through rate: supporting signals only. Do not optimise PMax to them.

How PPCPartner manages Performance Max

At PPCPartner we use Performance Max where the data supports it, and Search where it does not. For lead generation, we only run PMax once conversion tracking reports qualified leads, not just form fills. Brand runs in its own Search campaign with brand exclusions in PMax, so PMax results show new demand.

We are an MCP-driven Google Ads agency: AI connected to the Google Ads API pulls PMax search terms, channel splits, placements and asset performance every week in minutes, and a strategist decides what to change. Every change is confirmed by a person before it goes live.

Want to know whether PMax is helping or hurting your account? Get a free Google Ads audit, or see how we run Google Ads management.