Answering Your Top Questions About 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 campaign-level brand exclusions, campaign-level negative keywords, or account-level negative keywords. 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.

Performance Max campaigns can help you maximize 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 prioritizes bidding towards them.

One Watch Company, a leading watch and jewelry brand in Portugal, uploaded their first-party customer data and used the new customer acquisition goal with Performance Max to drive an 83% increase in new customer sales. Their jewelry segment was particularly effective and saw a 118% increase in new customer ROAS.

“Driving sales while also acquiring new customers during a hard-sale period like Black Friday — typically dominated by discounts — makes this strategy even more compelling and profitable, particularly as we offered no discounts at all on smartwatches and jewelry.”


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 prioritizes 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 cost¹.
  
  • 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.

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.

First-party audience exclusions: You can exclude specific customer lists from your Performance Max campaigns, and target the right customers for your business goals.

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.’’

Performance Max uses Google AI, along with your knowledge of your customers, to find audiences that are the best fit for you. Leverage billions of signals across Google and Youtube’s ecosystem for unparalleled audience understanding, to reach the right audience, at the right time, on the right surface.

You need a strong, data-backed definition of the audience that’s relevant to you. With this knowledge, you can provide audience signals to help steer AI towards the audiences that you know are valuable to your business. These signals include:

• Your first-party data (such as Customer Match Lists or Remarketing Lists)
• Interest/Affinity/In-Market Audiences
• Demographic Data

Audience signals allow you to add audience suggestions that help Google AI optimize for the goals you select for your Performance Max campaigns. Although adding audience signals is optional, using audience signals can help you guide machine learning models on the ideal way to optimize your campaign.

You’ll also want to align your bidding and goals to your business objectives.

• Customer Lifecycle Goals: Customer lifecycle goals in Google Ads help you increase value from both new and existing customers by revitalizing new customer acquisition efforts, seeking new high-value customers, or re-engaging lapsed customers.
• Campaign-level targeting: Optimize your location and language settings, and target ads to people based on the device they’re using.

If you need to broaden the audience and expand your reach, you can use search themes that let you add words and phrases your customers use to find your offerings to help Performance Max campaigns reach the right audience. By combining your expertise with Google AI, you’ll be able to expand your reach to relevant customers.

And finally, if you need to exclude any specific segments, you can use:

• Demographic exclusions (e.g. Age & Gender)
• Account-level IP exclusions: Internet Protocol (IP) Exclusions are now supported at the account level. You can use this to exclude specific IP addresses from seeing your ads across all campaigns in your account.
• First-party audience exclusions: Advertisers can exclude specific first-party (1P) audience lists from being targeted by their Performance Max campaigns. These exclusions only work on Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube, Discover, and Gmail inventory within Performance Max.

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 utilize 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 center.
  • 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.

In addition to our brand suitability controls, advertisers that have strict brand guidelines but want to take advantage of our creative automation can set brand guidelines to ensure their preferred fonts and colors are respected, as well as text guidelines to provide messaging restrictions and text exclusions.

Advertisers can opt in or out of creative automation features like image enhancements, video enhancements and text customization at any time, as well as remove any assets that they don’t want serving from the asset level report.

[“As a luxury brand, we thought Performance Max wasn’t for us. However, we’ve been able to properly test it, control our brand image, reach additional customers, and, in the end, increase the overall business performance.” - Antonio Giordano, Senior Director, Performance Marketing, Versace]

Just because Performance Max runs on the power of Google AI, it doesn’t mean that you can’t partner with it to provide inputs and experiment with different tactics to enhance its performance. Performance Max offers a suite of tools in Google Ads that help you A/B test different features, settings, and campaigns to improve results for your business.

• Performance Max asset experiments: Understand how improving asset coverage by adding more assets impacts performance (i.e. compare a campaign with an uploaded video vs. a campaign without an uploaded video), or test different versions of the same asset type to see how they perform against each other(e.g. compare assets to understand asset quality) to help make creative optimization decisions.
• Performance Max Final URL expansion experiments: This experiment tool will allow you to run an A/B test to measure the impact of turning on final URL expansion for your Performance Max campaign.
• Performance Max custom experiments (Beta): This is a custom A/B testing tool that empowers advertisers to experiment with various features and optimize campaign performance. This tool unlocks the ability to test a number of use cases, including: different bidding strategies/targets, implementing page feeds/URL contains, different audience signals or search themes, and more.
• Performance Max uplift experiments: Measure the conversion or conversion value uplift that Performance Max campaigns can provide when added as a complement to other campaign types, like Search, Display, Discovery, among others.
  

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.³ You can use A/B experiments to test the impact of adding a video to your Performance Max campaign.

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 available in Asset studio. You can select from various templates, customize your content with text, music, animated images, and voiceovers, and then preview your video before applying it to your campaign.
   
   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 practices 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.
   

When it comes to seasonal traffic spikes, it’s important to make sure you have enough budget to capture valuable opportunities, while not having to worry about daily manual adjustments. Campaign total budgets allow you to set the budget you want from 3 to 90 days. Instead of making daily manual tweaks to keep pace, campaign total budgets optimize your spend and aim to fully and effectively utilize your budget by your end date. We found that advertisers using campaign total budgets saw a 66% average reduction in manual budget adjustments compared to using daily budgets.⁵ Whether you’re running a 72-hour test or a month-long activation, you can launch with confidence knowing you won’t overspend or miss out on opportunities. Your campaign will stay on track for your budget goals without the need for daily maintenance. A best practice is to pair campaign total budgets with maximize conversion or conversion value.

But adjusting budgets alone might not be enough. You may also want to consider loosening your bidding targets so you have the tactical agility to fully capitalize on opportunities when market demand intensifies. Promotion mode lets you schedule temporary changes to your ROAS tolerance from 3 to 14 days and add extra daily budget during peaking periods, helping you maximize volume during seasonal events, flash sales, product launches, and more. In addition to being compatible with daily budgets, promotion mode’s ROAS tolerance adjustment can also be combined with campaign total budgets, letting you both accelerate your performance and manage your budget during key moments.

You can also utilize seasonality adjustments to inform Smart Bidding of any expected changes in conversion rates for future events, which will help optimize your bids.

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 optimizes 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:
   
   • Customize 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 maximizing 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 programs. 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 unrivaled 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.

Performance Max is a goal-based campaign that helps you maximize performance across all of Google’s channels: Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. It relies on full cross-channel automation across bidding, budget optimization, and audiences to find converting customers and maximize total return, making it best for broad efficiency and capturing demand wherever it exists across the Google ecosystem.

Conversely, Demand Gen is designed to drive your next wave of growth on YouTube and across Google’s most visual channels –creating, capturing, and converting demand before your customers start searching. Demand Gen combines the power of Google AI with granular placement and creative controls, helping you unlock 86% higher incremental long-term ROAS than paid social⁶.

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 optimize your campaign.

1. Make sure you have creative assets of all types and sizes. Maximizing 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 utilization 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 optimize your budget and the Performance Planner to help you manage budgets and forecasts for your campaign.
   • Your customers could be searching for things you hadn’t even considered. By opting into Smart Bidding Exploration, you can get conversions from less obvious queries that you weren’t able to win before, without changing your targeting. Smart Bidding Exploration is available for Search traffic in your Performance Max campaigns and is currently in beta for Shopping traffic as well.
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. Ensure text customization and the final URL expansion feature are enabled to boost Search inventory results in Performance Max. Performance Max’s keywordless targeting already helps you capture complex user intent and untapped queries, including in new surfaces like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Final URL Expansion and Text Customization help you maximize performance and deliver personalized experiences at scale by tailoring your ads and directing users to the most relevant landing page.
   
   • Text customization allows 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 center 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.
7. Switch to demand-led budgeting. Don’t let your budget cap become a profit cap. Consumer demand changes every day, so your budget needs to be flexible to help you capture every opportunity without limitation and prevent you from falling behind the competition. With Performance Max, demand-led budgets let Google AI capture shifting pockets of demand across all of Google’s channels to find your next best conversion.
   
   • The new Investment Strategy tab on the Recommendations page helps you make informed decisions about how to allocate additional budget across your campaigns to maximize performance.

Watch this video to learn more.

Performance Max has campaign-level negative keywords, in addition to account-level negative keywords. With campaign-level negative keywords, you can exclude specific queries from your Performance Max campaign for brand suitability or other reasons. A maximum of 10,000 negative keywords can be applied at the campaign level. Keep in mind that negative keywords do not match to close variants.

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.