Performance Max: the five things you can still control

Performance Max is the campaign type advertisers most love to complain about, usually for a fair reason: it spends across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and tells you very little about which of those did the work.

But "less reporting" is not "no control". Here is what still matters.

1. Asset group structure

An asset group is PMax's equivalent of an ad group, and the most common mistake is having exactly one, stuffed with everything.

Split asset groups by theme, not by keyword — one per service line, product category or audience. Each gets its own headlines, descriptions, images and video. That way the machine is choosing between coherent options rather than mixing a dental implant headline with an orthodontics image.

Worth knowing: if you provide no video, Google auto-generates one from your images. It is usually poor and it will run. Upload even a simple ten-second video and you take that slot back.

2. Audience signals are a hint, not a target

This trips people up constantly. Audience signals do not restrict targeting the way a Search audience does — they tell the model where to start looking. It will expand beyond them.

Give it your best data in priority order:

• Customer lists — actual buyers, uploaded and hashed
• Website visitors who converted, not all visitors
• Custom segments built from competitor and high-intent search terms
• In-market segments last, because they are the broadest

3. The feed decides more than the creative

For retail, PMax leans heavily on the Merchant Center feed. Title, product type, brand and image quality drive matching far more than your asset group copy does.

For lead generation there is no product feed, so the equivalent is your page feed: a list of the URLs PMax may send traffic to. Supply one. Without it, PMax picks its own pages and will happily send high-intent traffic to your homepage.

4. Exclusions, especially brand

By default, PMax will take credit for people searching your own brand name — traffic you would have got for free. This inflates its reported ROAS and quietly makes it look better than it is.

• Add brand exclusions at campaign level so PMax leaves your own name alone.
• Add account-level negative keywords for irrelevant recurring themes.
• Exclude mobile app placements — they are a persistent source of accidental clicks.
• Exclude your existing customers if you are prospecting rather than retaining.

5. What you count is what you get

PMax optimises hard toward whatever you tell it a conversion is worth. If every lead is worth "1", it will find you the cheapest possible leads, and cheap leads are cheap for a reason.

Use different conversion values for different actions. A booked consultation should be worth several times a newsletter signup. If you can import closed deals from your CRM, do that — then PMax optimises toward revenue rather than form fills.

Getting some visibility back

You cannot see everything, but you can see more than the interface suggests:

• The search terms insight report shows categories, not exact queries — still enough to spot drift.
• The asset group performance report ranks assets Low / Good / Best. Replace every Low.
• A Google Ads script can pull placement-level data the UI will not show you.
• Run Search campaigns alongside on your core terms. Search takes priority for exact matches, so you keep both control and visibility where it matters most.

That last point is the one I would push hardest. PMax is a good discovery engine and a poor scalpel. Keep your highest-intent, highest-value keywords in a Search campaign where you can see and control them, and let PMax find the demand you did not know about.