Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that allows you to access all Google Ads inventory, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps, from a single campaign. You can use Performance Max to complement your keyword-based search campaigns, to help optimise performance based on specific goals, and to find new ways to help generate more conversions and value.
This article outlines the benefits of Performance Max, explains how it works and provides answers to your frequently asked questions.
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On this page
- Benefits
- How Performance Max works
- When to use Performance Max
- Bear in mind
- Frequently asked questions
- Next steps
Benefits
- Unlock new audiences: You can use Google's real-time analysis of consumer intent and preferences, along with audience signals, to unlock new customer segments and find more converting customers.
- Drive better performance: Use data-driven attribution and Google AI predictions about ads, audiences and creative combinations to help optimise for touchpoints that can drive customers to convert.
- Get transparent insights: Use insights, like rising search trends and asset reporting, to understand changes in performance, to help optimise creatives for impact and to inform your business strategy.
- Automate and simplify campaign management: Customise the goals that matter to your business and engage customers across Google channels to help maximise conversions or conversion value.
How Performance Max works
When you create a Performance Max campaign, the assets and settings that you provide in your campaign or Google Ads account (like images, data feeds and bidding goals) are combined with the power of Google AI to serve across all available inventory and automatically optimise based on your goals to help drive the best conversions and value.
Review the details below to understand how you can fully harness Google AI to optimise your campaigns.
| Performance Max setup and features | How you build your campaign | How Google AI supports your campaign |
| Conversion goals and values | Define what conversion actions you care about and assign an optional ROAS or CPA target. | Using Smart Bidding, real-time auctions bid based on your conversion probability. |
| Creative Assets | Provide text, images and videos, then turn on text customisation and brand guidelines. | Generative AI tools combine your assets and creatives to help generate engaging images and videos. Learn more about Performance Max's generative AI tools. |
| Audience signals | Share customer intent preferences to guide learning. | Accelerates campaign learning using high-intent audiences. |
| Safety and budgets | Set daily spend targets and brand safety settings, such as brand exclusions, placement exclusions and content suitability filters. | Automatically funnels your budget towards the highest-performing inventory and placements. |
Get started with Ask Advisor
You can use Ask Advisor to save time to analyse changes to your account performance. Ask Advisor is an agentic conversational experience built with Gemini in Google Ads. You can use Ask Advisor to maximise performance based on your unique business goals. Ask Advisor can also get personalised answers to your questions, understand and improve campaign performance, troubleshoot performance or ads policy issues, and suggest new text and creatives. Learn more about Ask Advisor (beta).
When to use Performance Max
Performance Max leverages Google AI to find converting customers across Google's channels based on your specific goals. As a result, it's the recommended option when:
- Your business has specific conversion goals, such as to increase online sales or to generate leads.
- You want to maximise the performance of your campaign without restricting where your ads appear.
- You want to access all of Google's advertising channels using a single campaign.
- You want to increase reach and conversion value beyond keyword-based search campaigns.
Bear in mind
You can create a Performance Max campaign if your campaign objective is 'Sales', 'Leads', 'Website traffic' or 'Local shop visits and promotions', or if you create a campaign without a goal's guidance.
Search integration and campaign controls
After you choose to create a Performance Max campaign, you can set up your search and campaign controls. Search campaigns containing an exact-matched keyword are prioritised to serve over Performance Max when a query hits an exact-matched keyword. Search themes carry the same priority as phrase and broad-matched keywords. Learn more about ad group and asset group prioritisation within a Google Ads account.
If your search campaign is budget limited, Performance Max may occasionally serve on exact-matched terms. Use the following controls to refine campaign reach:
- Brand exclusions and negative keywords: Prevent overlaps and block unwanted queries.
- Search themes and keywordless targeting: Guide AI towards high-value search intent.
- Final URL expansion: Allow Google to match queries to relevant landing pages and auto-generate dynamic assets. Note that you remain responsible for reviewing and ensuring compliance and accuracy of landing page content, and all dynamically generated assets.
- Budget recommendations: Utilise built-in daily recommendations (low, medium, high) and performance forecasts during setup to prevent low starts. Learn more about viewing budget details.
Creative controls
Text customisation
Text customisation is a campaign-level setting that generates additional text assets. Google AI generates headlines and descriptions from your landing page content, domain and current ads. The system combines these automated assets with your provided assets to improve campaign performance. Learn more about text customisation in Performance Max campaigns.
Final URL expansion
If you turn on final URL expansion, Google may replace your final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user's search query, and generate a dynamic headline and description to match your landing page content.
Video assets
Auto-generated videos are a campaign-level setting that help you generate additional video assets. These assets will appear in campaign-level settings. Learn more about video assets for Performance Max campaigns.
Frequently asked questions
What campaign-level controls are available for Performance Max?
Performance Max has several campaign-level controls to help you achieve your goals:
- Keywordless targeting
- Final URL expansion or asset optimisation
- Search themes
- Negative keywords
- Brand exclusions
Learn more about search targeting and controls for Performance Max.
What are Performance Max asset groups?
You can view budget details using the budget panel in Google Ads. The budget panel, found on the campaign review page, provides customised budget recommendations to help optimise performance and to help prevent low starts. This panel provides the following data-driven insights about your campaigns:
- Recommended budget level: The panel displays up to three daily budget suggestions (low, medium and high) based on your campaign settings and account history. The lower level is the minimum recommended budget for your campaign, and selecting a higher budget level may further increase its overall effectiveness.
- Performance forecasting: You can understand the potential reach and performance gains associated with each budget level. This transparency helps you to align your investment with targeted goals.
What reporting options are available for Performance Max campaigns?
Performance Max campaigns offer several reporting options depending on your campaign and goals. These include:
- Assets-level metrics
- Asset group reporting
- Channel performance
- Integrate Google Analytics
- Advanced reporting and controls for creative video
- Placement reports
- Conversion tracking
Learn more about Performance Max reporting.
