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Learn what sets Performance Max apart from other Google Ads campaigns, and how it can drive conversions and maximize ROI.
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Google Performance Max: Everything you need to know
Learn what sets Performance Max apart from other Google Ads campaigns, and how it can drive conversions and maximize ROI.
Menachem Ani on May 15, 2025 at 9:00 am | Reading time: 20 minutes
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Opinion
Even the most old-school PPC managers can’t deny it anymore: Performance Max is capable of amazing things.
It does require a certain level of setup (like good-quality data inputs) and a different mindset than Search and Shopping, but it’s no longer the struggling tech we knew from the beta four years ago.
Let me give you an example.
Years ago, when working with retailers selling products from many different brands, you’d typically make a separate Shopping campaign for each one.
Try that with Performance Max, and you’ll force it into doing something it’s not built for.
And performance certainly won’t be at max.
Consolidation is the name of the game here.
Performance will take off if you leverage its machine learning and smart algorithms, especially if you want it to become the incremental giant it’s capable of being.
But carry forward your habits from the more granular campaign types, and Performance Max’s algorithmic nature will punish you.
Here’s everything you need to know about Google’s Performance Max campaign so that you can keep those needles moving in the right direction in 2025 and beyond.
What is Performance Max?
Performance Max in Google Ads is the culmination of everything that makes the world’s largest search engine special.
Years of collecting data on people’s browsing and purchasing behavior have allowed Google to create a campaign that’s tailored to individual searches.
Rather than placing ads in specific inventory types – like search results or product listings – Performance Max allows advertisers to upload all types of assets and access all of Google’s ad placements from one campaign. That includes:
Text.
Videos.
Feeds.
Images.
After being released to limited accounts during its alpha (2020) and beta (2021) stages, Performance Max rolled out to the wider Google Ads community in 2022 ahead of the peak shopping season.
Since then, Google has continued to support Performance Max by releasing new features, including brand exclusions and asset group-level reporting.
Dig deeper: 5 ways to get the most from Performance Max in 2025
What makes Performance Max powerful?
Google intended Performance Max to be an all-in-one campaign type capable of serving the needs of as many advertisers as possible.
Here are some of the defining features that make that possible.
Targeting capabilities
Keywords, audiences, and product feeds remain the backbone of campaign targeting.
This is no different when it comes to Performance Max, but what sets this campaign apart is how those three elements behave and work together.
While it will quickly bypass any initial settings you give it in pursuit of the best conversions, Performance Max starts on better footing when you apply these from day one.
Audience signals
Use these to tell Performance Max what kind of users you want to show your ads to – but remember, it won’t be those exact people.
For example, uploading your customer list as an audience signal doesn’t mean your ad will show to them (or even to others like them), but as a jumping-off point for its own targeting.
Keywords
Performance Max will quickly begin targeting broad queries not directly related to your initial targeting intent (based on custom intent audiences, product data feed, and website URL).
While the absence of negative keywords can be frustrating, it’s likely you’ll still capture opportunities you didn’t consider. Performance Max can also analyze custom intent audiences you build from keywords.
Product feed
As always, a strong data feed is critical to success with Shopping campaigns.
Without an optimized product feed, Google won’t know which queries to show your products for.
Throw in a robust feed, and you will capture opportunities you didn’t even consider because of how Performance Max branches off from your initial path.
Bid management
Performance Max uses Smart Bidding to set cost-per-click (CPC) bids, which effectively means that advertisers have two options when it comes to bid strategies:
Maximize conversions with an optional CPA target.
Maximize conversion value with an optional ROAS target.
For this to work optimally, your account needs a sizable amount of historical data that Google can use to determine what’s worked best in the past.
I typically recommend that newer accounts begin with Search or Standard Shopping to gather data, only switching over to Performance Max after maxing out impression share and building a steady stream of conversions.
Complex auctions and intent matching
Google has a massive store of data on how people behave online.
Smart Bidding analyzes over 70 million signals in near real-time (actually a tenth of a second), but we never see those data points.
A certain amount of trust in the system is required for this to work, but do that, and you’ll get the results you want.
Consider 100 people searching for the same exact query.
Not only will each person be in a different part of the buying journey, but their unique histories will influence factors like how quickly they might convert. The system will try to find those people most likely to convert during that search.
For ecommerce, fill those data feeds out with the right information – keywords in titles and descriptions, product categorization, and so on.
This will allow you to appear in as many searches as possible, irrespective of whether somebody is “window shopping” or ready to buy.
New customer acquisition and brand exclusions
Performance Max has long since allowed advertisers to target net new revenue by bidding higher for new acquisitions.
It now allows brand exclusions to better control when your ads show for branded queries.
These features may not be as important for smaller advertisers, but larger brands looking to scale can now tell the system to focus on more valuable opportunities.
When used together, these features can significantly alter the speed and profitability of a scaling process.
Thanks to asset group-level reporting rolling out to many accounts, we can use these for segmentation more effectively.
When we see that certain product segments – brand, category, individual products – are not getting traction or not performing as well, we exclude them and:
Put them in a new Performance Max campaign to force it to spend.
Or go back to Standard Shopping.
Think of it as pruning your campaigns for what’s not getting traffic or converting
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