What is Performance Max?
It's a Google Ads campaign type built around a goal rather than keywords. You give it a conversion goal, a budget, your assets and, if you sell products, your Merchant Center feed. Google then decides where to show your ads, to whom and with which combination of headlines, images and videos.
Google pitches it as a complement to keyword-based Search campaigns, not a replacement for everything. That's worth taking seriously.
What are the pros of Performance Max?
The upside is reach and speed of learning, as long as the inputs are good.
- Reach: one campaign can find buyers on placements a Search-only account never touches, such as YouTube and Discover.
- Automation: bidding, placement and asset combinations are tested for you, which saves hours of manual work.
- Visual products do well: showing products across YouTube and Discover suits brands people buy with their eyes.
- One budget: spend moves to wherever conversions are coming from, without you shifting it between campaigns.
What are the cons of Performance Max?
The downside is control. Automation finds the easiest conversions, which aren't always the ones you'd pay for.
- Brand traffic: it can pick up searches for your own name, people who would have bought anyway, and report those sales as its own.
- Bad tracking gets amplified: if a page view or an add to basket counts as a conversion, it will deliver more of that.
- A flat feed: if bestsellers, slow movers and low-margin lines share one group and one target, budget flows to whatever converts most easily.
- Less transparent reporting: you see less of where each click came from than in a Search campaign.
- Small accounts struggle: with only a handful of conversions a month, there's very little for it to learn from.
How do you weigh Performance Max pros and cons for your account?
Run through these checks in order. If you fail the first two, fix them before you spend anything on Performance Max.
- Check what counts as a conversion. Only real purchases or real leads should be primary goals, with values where you have them.
- Check volume. If the account gets very few conversions a month, start with Search and come back later.
- Clean the feed: accurate titles, prices, stock and images. Titles carry a lot of the matching.
- Group products by how they perform, so strong sellers get room to scale and click-without-sale lines get their own budget or target.
- Keep a separate brand Search campaign, and apply brand exclusions in Performance Max so it can't claim those sales.
- Add negative keywords and placement exclusions for searches and sites you don't want.
- Keep Search campaigns for your most important non-brand terms, so you control the message and the landing page.
- Review insights, search terms and asset reports regularly, and replace assets that don't pull their weight.
- Judge it on total sales in your own store or CRM, before and after, not on its reported results alone.
Should you run Search and Shopping alongside it?
For most ecommerce accounts, yes. A brand Search campaign gives you a clean read on sales from people who already know you, and Search campaigns for key non-brand terms keep the message tight.
Whether a standard Shopping campaign is worth keeping depends on the account. Some stores use it for products they want to control closely; in others the two compete. Test it on your own data rather than following a rule.
How do you tell if Performance Max is working?
Look at your store's own numbers. Compare total online sales before and after, check how much reported revenue came from brand searches, and watch each product group separately.
If the campaign's reported results keep climbing but your overall sales don't move, it's probably taking credit for sales you'd have had anyway.