Answering Your Top Questions About Performance Max

To get visibility into your channel performance, connect with your account manager to apply for the channel performance report beta. Once allowlisted, navigate to your campaign and click the “Insights and reports” tab and then select “Channel performance”. On this page you’ll find a performance summary, along with a visualisation of how all your channels contribute to your business goals. In this visualisation, you can drill into specific channels to understand how they play a part in driving performance and find areas of potential improvement.

You can utilise the channel distribution table if you want a more granular view of your channel performance results, such as clicks, conversions, cost, and more. You can also download this data to share it outside of Google Ads.

In both the visualisation and the channel distribution table, you’ll be able to break down your performance by key ad formats, including video ads and ads using product data. You’ll also see diagnostics in the “Status” column of this table to find potential areas of improvement.

You can break down your performance by key ad formats, including ads using product data, in the channel performance report. This segmentation is available in both the channel-to-goals visualisation and the channel distribution table. Ads using product data can include Shopping ads (across Search, YouTube, and Maps) as well as dynamic remarketing ads for Display. Other formats using a Google Merchant Center feed such as video ads with product offers on YouTube and Discover are not included yet. You can use these insights to find areas of improvement; for example, if you find your ads using product data are not showing up as much month-over-month, you could focus on improving imagery in your product feed.

Start with your campaign-level performance to understand if Performance Max is achieving your goals; you should focus on your goals and overall performance, rather than individual channels. This is because Performance Max optimises for marginal ROI, which is foundational to how cross-channel bid optimisation works. Marginal ROI is the additional return-on-investment you get from additional spend. Looking at average CPA or ROAS for individual segments within a campaign doesn’t tell the whole story. This is because average values don’t reflect the cumulative value of maximising marginal conversions or conversion value in each and every auction. Even if a segment has lower overall ROI compared to others on average and across all auctions, it may still be the most performant traffic with the highest marginal ROI within a single auction. Remember, users aren’t tied to a single channel as they search, stream, scroll, and shop. By prioritising your goals and customers before individual channels, you’ll be able to find more valuable conversions, no matter where they might be!

Keeping that in mind, you can use channel performance data to find new areas to invest in, such as your creative. For example, you might find that you are performing well on YouTube, so you decide to invest more in your video creative. Make sure to follow best practises and optimisation tips according to your business type, goals, and marketing objectives to set up your campaign for optimal results and ensure your campaign is not limited by budget to engage with more customers, effectively and at scale. You can also use the provided diagnostics, which can be found in the channel distribution table’s “Status” column to gain insights into potential areas that may limit your ability to serve within your channels and get recommendations for improvement.

Attracting high-quality leads is crucial for lead gen advertisers’ success. These best practises have been proven to drive big lead quality gains:

1. Improve your conversion measurement: AI is only as good as the data you put into it. That’s why better conversion measurement is the fastest way to fuel Google AI to deliver higher quality leads for your campaigns. There are two main ways to achieve this:
   
   • Use enhanced conversions for leads: Enhanced conversions for leads bridges the gap between offline transactions and their online origins, which helps Google AI better identify high-quality leads likely to convert. It’s a more durable way to measure performance and prevent data gaps because it relies on consented, first-party customer data rather than third-party, cookie-based tracking, and connects hashed lead information from your CRM back to Google Ads.
     Enhanced conversions for leads is easy to set up—you can configure it straight from your Google Ads account. For a detailed guide on how to get started, take a look at this handy article.
   • Define clear conversion categories: By defining conversion categories, you can tailor your campaigns to optimise towards specific lead generation goals, including “qualified lead”, “converted lead”, “book appointment”, “sign-up”, “contact”, “submit lead form”, “phone call”, or “request quote”. When you pick these campaign goals, you’ll automatically trigger invalid traffic protections built specifically for lead generation campaigns, helping to safeguard campaign quality.
     
2. Use Value-Based Bidding: Use “Maximise conversion value” or Target ROAS bidding to attract higher-quality leads and achieve greater value from your budget. This value-based bidding strategy prioritises leads with the strongest potential for high-value sales by factoring in data you share about what different leads and conversions are worth to you. On average, advertisers that switch their bid strategy from having a target CPA to a target ROAS can see 14% more conversion value at a similar return on ad spend. It’s key to remember that the more conversion data that you have, the faster Google AI is able to deliver the results you’re looking for. So, strike a balance: you should prioritise conversion actions close to the final sale to signal quality leads, but ensure enough volume for optimisation. Start by mapping your lead-to-sale journey, including micro-conversions at first, and then gradually optimise towards higher-value actions as your data grows.
   
3. Share audience signals, especially your first-party data: Help Google AI understand your ideal new customer profile by sharing existing customer data through Customer Match lists. This fuels Performance Max to reach other potential, high-value customers with similar characteristics. You can also steer your campaigns by better expressing the value of conversions based on geographic location, device, and audiences using conversion value rules.
   
4. Optimise your lead form and website to drive high quality leads: There are a number of additional steps you can take to reduce invalid traffic and leads.
   
   
   • Verify leads: Combat automated bots and ensure authentic leads by adding frictionless verification steps like ReCaptcha to your lead forms.
   • Use a double-opt in approach: When customers provide their contact information (such as email addresses), ensure they confirm these are valid, for example by sending a confirmation link via email, before adding them to your CRM or mailing lists to check that you’re engaging with high-intent customers.
   • Add server-side validation to validate web forms: Server-side validation is a website security feature that your web developer can set up to double-check all visitor information on the server. It’s an additional safeguard, ensuring accuracy and preventing issues if someone tries to submit invalid or harmful data.
   • Leverage content suitability controls: You can use content suitability controls such as placement exclusions, IP exclusions, negative keywords, and more where applicable.

For a more detailed breakdown, take a look at our best practises for generating leads on Performance Max.

Performance Max campaigns serve across all of Google’s advertising channels, including Search. If you don’t want Performance Max to serve on your branded queries on Search, you can implement account-level negative keywords, campaign-level negative keywords, or campaign-level brand exclusions. You can also use these solutions for branded queries beyond your own, such as competitors’ brands or sub-brands of your business.


Campaign-level brand exclusions are a better option for blocking brand traffic than account-level or campaign-level negative keywords due to their ability to block misspellings and foreign scripts of the brands you want to exclude, including your own. Keep in mind that you should watch out for how exclusions impact your reach and performance to make sure you’re not missing out on valuable conversion opportunities.

If any brands or business names are missing from the list, you’ll see an option in Google Ads to request additions.

Yes! Images that you generate in Performance Max will be unique to you as Performance Max never generates the same asset twice. Subject to our policies and terms, you can use assets generated by Performance Max in places outside of your Google Ads account if you like them, including on your website. All images created with generative AI in Google Ads, including Performance Max, will be identified as such. We’re using SynthID to invisibly watermark these images and they will include open standard metadata to indicate the image was generated by AI.

Today’s average consumer switches between different search, shopping, and video platforms, and browses multiple websites and apps during their purchase journeys. To capture their attention and drive results, video ads are no longer optional—they’re table stakes. Advertisers that included at least one video in their Performance Max campaigns saw an average 12% uplift in conversions.²

There are two ways to add video to your Performance Max campaign:

1. Upload your own video: you can upload existing video assets you have, or use the video creation tool. To make it easier to provide high-quality video ads, video creation tools are integrated directly into Performance Max campaign setup and editing workflows. You can select from various templates, customise your content with text, music, animated images, and voiceovers, and then preview your video before applying it to your campaign. For a detailed demo on how to use the video creation tool, watch this video.
   
   If you’re uploading your own video assets to your campaign, here are two key tips for success:
   
   • Use diverse aspect ratios: Include vertical, horizontal and square assets. This gives Google AI more options to match the right video ad to the right audience and context. Advertisers that included at least one video of each orientation (horizontal, vertical, and square) to their Performance Max campaigns delivered 20% more conversions in YouTube compared to horizontal videos alone.
   • Follow best practises for action-driving video: Learn your ABCDs—Attention, Branding, Connection, and Direction—to craft compelling video ads that motivate viewers to take action.

2. Automatically generated video: Short on time or creative resources? No problem. If you don’t upload your own video assets, Performance Max uses video generation technology powered by Google AI to create and serve videos in multiple orientations using your other assets such as images, text, or Google Merchant Center product listings. These videos are created at the asset group level, meaning that the ingredients used will be selected from the given asset group. You can help direct the content of these videos by adding relevant assets and grouping your asset groups into meaningful themes for different product categories.
   
   Auto-generated video ensures your brand can show up when it matters. Google AI automatically selects the right mix of template, colours, fonts, and music to resonate with your audience and boost campaign performance. Like a video production team, on call.

Performance Max campaigns can help you maximise total sales and revenue from both new and existing customers. Engaging existing customers can be highly profitable as they already know and trust your brand, often leading to repeat conversions at a lower cost or higher average-order-value.

If your primary focus is new customer acquisition, focus on the new customer acquisition goal and brand exclusions.

New customer acquisition goal: Using data from Customer Match lists and the Google Tag, Google AI effectively identifies new prospects and prioritises bidding towards them.

The new customer acquisition goal offers 2 bidding modes:

• New Customer Value mode (recommended): We recommend New Customer Value mode for all advertisers with online sales goals. It prioritises bidding towards new customers, while maintaining your engagement with potential repeat customers. Advertisers using this mode have seen strong results, including a 9% ROAS increase, 5% higher new customer ratio, and 7% reduced new customer acquisition cost.
  
  • New Customer Acquisition High-Value Mode: Use this mode if you have campaigns with purchase goals and can upload high-value customer segments via Customer Match. This advanced strategy lets you set different bidding priorities for high-value new prospects, regular new customers, and existing ones.
• New Customer Only mode: Use this strategy if you have dedicated budgets specifically for new customer acquisition, or have non-purchase goals like lead generation. This mode focuses exclusively on acquiring new customers, so we recommend setting up a separate Performance Max campaign to connect with potential repeat customers.

So, how do you get started? If you’ve already got Customer Match and the Google Tag in place, using the goal is straightforward: select “Customer Acquisition” in your campaign objectives and goals, identify your pre-existing customer lists, and provide an estimated average revenue from new customers.

If Customer Match isn’t configured yet, make setting it up a priority. It can have an immediate positive impact on your campaigns. In fact, advertisers who apply Customer Match list signals see an average of 5.3% conversion uplift.⁵

For a detailed walkthrough on how to set up new customer acquisition in Performance Max, and to learn different ways to calculate the value of a new customer, watch this video.

Brand exclusions: You can prevent your Performance Max campaign from serving on specific brand terms (your own, competitor, or partner brands) in Search & Shopping inventory to gain a clearer view of your campaign’s true prospecting potential. For retail advertisers with product feeds, you can apply brand exclusions to just Search text ads, while keeping branded traffic for Shopping ads. This can be especially useful if you value showing Shopping ads for brand terms, but may want to manage Search text ads for brand terms in a different campaign. Monitor your campaign’s reach and performance after implementing exclusions to make sure you’re not missing out on valuable opportunities.

There are several brand suitability controls you can use to make sure ads from your Performance Max campaigns are in line with your brand safety requirements.

These various tools help you exclude types of content that, while in compliance with Google Ads policies, may not fit your brand or business.

• Content suitability settings which let you exclude or filter unsuitable content. At the account level, you can utilise content and placement exclusions.
  
  
  • For example, if you want to prevent ads from serving on certain types of content in your Performance Max campaign, such as tragedy and conflict or sensitive social issues, you can exclude sensitive content categories in the content suitability centre.
  • Placement exclusions stop your ads from showing on specific YouTube and Display content. Performance Max respects all your account and MCC-level placement exclusions. You can also include Search Partner sites in your account-level placement exclusions.
• Account-level negative keywords let you set negative keywords at an account-level and exclude specific queries across your whole account for brand suitability. Campaign-level negative keywords let you set negative keywords at a campaign-level and exclude specific queries across your Performance Max campaign. We recommend using account-level negative keywords if you want to exclude queries for brand suitability reasons, since they apply across all your campaigns.

No! During campaign construction, you will select the specific store locations that you want to target and Performance Max for store goals will automatically apply a dynamic radius target in the back-end. This will ensure you accurately target specific stores and show ads to customers who are most likely to visit your store.

Dynamic radius targeting uses a range of signals to reach the right audience. These include:

• Location
• Distance to location
• Search query
• Device
• Likelihood to visit

After you set up your campaign, we do not recommend using the campaign settings tab to manually apply geo targets. You also should not apply any additional radius targets. The additional targeting could cause you to target more stores than intended and can cause ads to be shown to users further from your store locations.

However, you can still use the campaigns setting tab to exclude specific locations and not show ads in a specific zip code, state or country without impacting the store locations you chose earlier during campaign construction.

Advertisers will have different campaign structures based on their business and performance goals. Here are three key principles to keep in mind:

1. Streamline and consolidate your campaign structure, where possible. AI learns faster and makes better predictions with more data and performance history. It also optimises more effectively when it can allocate spend flexibly to where the highest-ROI opportunity exists in each auction. Avoid creating separate campaigns unless they require different budgets, CPA/ROAS targets, or settings for business reasons.
   
2. Match your campaign structure to your business needs. For example, you may need to create different Performance Max campaigns if you want to:
   
   
   • Customise assets for different countries or languages.
   • Dedicate different budgets and CPA/ROAS targets to different marketing objectives or goals (e.g. a store-centric budget). That being said, you can also create a Performance Max campaign that supports multiple conversion goals. For example, you may have a shared budget across your website and stores with the goal of maximising total revenue.
   • Allocate specific budgets and CPA/ROAS targets for seasonal moments like holidays, new store openings, promotions and events, etc.
   • Set different ROAS targets for certain product categories.
     
3. Segment asset groups based on meaningful themes that require different creative assets. For example, an online university may have different campaigns for different degree programmemes. And then split their asset groups by the different types of classes offered.
   
   
   Tip

   If you have the same budget across evergreen and seasonal moments, we recommend having one unified Performance Max campaign and using asset groups to segment by different occasions.

For advertisers with performance goals like online sales or lead generation, Google Ads delivers the best AI for your best ROI, helping you be where discovery starts and decisions are made. It turns attention into intent across the consumer journey with AI-powered campaigns purpose-built to fit your needs.

Whether it’s the cross-channel reach of Performance Max, or the unrivalled influence of Demand Gen, each campaign can be used alone or in concert to help you build the right marketing strategy tailored to your business needs.

With Performance Max, you’ll get the full power of Google’s channels and AI, all in one campaign to maximise performance. It drives the strongest performance and ROAS across all of Google’s channels: Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. It automatically uses the full power of Google AI from end-to-end to improve your bidding, audiences, creative, and more.

And with Demand Gen, you can create and convert demand on YouTube and Google’s most visual surfaces when consumers are earlier in their purchase journeys and aren’t searching for you. It combines the power of AI with the choice and flexibility of more controls to help you drive performance at a ROI similar to social platforms.

When comparing use cases, it’s important to consider what Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns both uniquely offer to your marketing strategy:

If you find that your Performance Max campaign isn’t scaling or driving sufficient volume of conversions, there are a few ways you can optimise your campaign.

1. Make sure you have creative assets of all types and sizes. Maximising your number of assets helps you engage customers more effectively and show ads that resonate with them based on their unique context, needs, and preferences.
   
   • Your goal should be to improve the Ad Strength of the asset group to “Excellent.”
2. Check if you have CPA or ROAS targets and make sure they aren’t overly constraining. Overly constraining your campaigns by setting a target that’s too restrictive can impact how many auctions your campaign can participate in and how many conversions it can drive.
   
   • A good tip is to check your bid strategy report—if your actual cost per acquisition is consistently above your target, consider raising your target to a more realistic number to help increase your reach and conversions.
   • You can also check your budget utilisation to make sure you are not budget constrained. You can evaluate whether you should add and/or redistribute budget between your various campaigns. You can also use budget pacing insights to help optimise your budget and the Performance Planner to help you manage budgets and forecasts for your campaign.
3. Try adding or updating search themes to expand your reach and drive more conversions. Search themes let you indicate queries that you know your customers are looking for. They are additive to the queries and placements Performance Max predicts will perform well based on your assets, feeds, and landing pages. This helps your Performance Max campaigns serve on placements that may not be obvious to the AI but where you expect to drive good results. Here are a few examples where search themes can be especially useful:
   
   • Your landing page does not have a lot of details about the products and services you offer.
   • You’ve just expanded into a new market or launched a new product or service.
   • You are launching a new promotion or sale for the holiday season that you don’t have extensive performance history for.
4. Use text customisation and the final URL expansion features to boost Search inventory results in Performance Max. These help you improve the variety of your Search text assets to create more relevant ads for customers and send them to better landing pages on your website.
   
   • text customisation allow your Performance Max campaign to use content from your landing pages to automatically create new and relevant text assets for your Search ads.
   • Final URL expansion will help your ads to show up on more searches that have a strong likelihood of leading to conversions, and it uses landing pages on your website to match your ads to more relevant queries.
   • You can also use URL rules, such as URL contains and Page feeds, to further refine the list of pages you send traffic to. When used with the URL expansion feature turned on, the campaign uses your rule as a signal to expand to additional relevant pages. When used with the URL expansion feature turned off, the campaign will only send traffic to landing pages that satisfy the rule.
5. Audit your account and campaign-level exclusion settings to make sure they are still relevant and necessary. While these settings give you additional control over where your ads can show, exclusions can limit your campaign performance.
   
   • You can audit your display and video content exclusions in the content suitability centre and you can audit your account level negative keywords under account settings. For campaign-level negative keywords and brand exclusions, you can audit them within your Performance Max campaign.
6. Check out diagnostics in the channel performance report. Uncover insights into areas of potential improvement by finding what may be limiting your ads serving on your channels and get recommendations on how to resolve this.

Watch this video to learn more.

In search terms insights, you can find a “Source” column that will let you see whether queries are coming from the search themes you’ve added or Performance Max’s keywordless targeting.

You’ll also be able to check out the “Signals” in your campaign to see your search themes, along with a usefulness indicator next to them. These indicators let you know if your search themes are driving incremental traffic beyond what is captured by your URLs and creative assets, or whether you should consider updating or replacing your search themes.