About automatically created assets in Performance Max campaigns

Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that allows you to access your Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. To make setup simple, you can enable automatically created assets within your campaign settings. This feature allows Google to curate text and images from your landing page(s) and show them in your ads when they are predicted to improve performance.

This article explains how to use automatically created assets in your current Performance Max campaigns. If you’re interested in learning more or using automatically created assets outside your Performance Max campaigns, see 'About automatically created assets'.

On this page

• Automatically created assets
• Final URL
• URL exclusion
• Instructions to exclude URLs

Automatically created assets

Note: Automatically created assets are turned on by default. If you want to turn these assets off, untick the box during setup or from within your campaign's settings.

When needed, Google may automatically generate a dynamic headline, description or additional assets to match your landing page content. These automatically created assets help connect you to potential customers based on their search queries and intent. When this setting is turned on, Google uses AI to create descriptions, headlines and additional assets from your landing page, domain, and existing ads and creative assets. It’s recommended that you keep this setting turned on to optimise campaign performance.

Control automatically created assets

Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the 'Appearance' icon, and select Use previous design. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the Search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page that you’re searching for.

You can turn automatically created assets on or off from your Google Ads account. Follow the steps below to update your Performance Max campaign settings.

1. In your Google Ads account, click the campaigns icon .
2. Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click Campaigns.
4. Find the row with the Performance Max campaign that you'd like to edit, then click the gear icon to open 'Settings'.
5. Under the 'Automatically created assets' section, tick or untick the boxes for 'Text assets' and 'Final URL'.
   • Note: You can’t select 'Final URL' without selecting 'Text assets'.
6. Click Save.

Text assets

Using this setting means your campaign may use content from your landing page, domain and provided assets to customise ads when it is predicted to improve performance. We recommend leaving this on.

Final URL

Enabling this setting allows your campaign to replace your final URL with a more relevant landing page from the final URL domain, based on the user’s search intent.

Note: When running Performance Max campaigns for shop goals only (shop visits, shop sales, contacts and direction clicks), final URL expansion isn't supported.

Below you can review a few cases that explain how advertisers might use automatically created asset settings in Performance Max:

• I'm trying to improve my campaign performance → Leave automatically created asset settings (text assets and final URL) on.

Note: If automatically created asset settings are turned on, Google may replace your final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query and generate a dynamic headline, description and additional assets to match your landing page content. Learn more about automatically created assets.

• I'm trying to improve my campaign performance but don’t want to show ads for certain terms → Leave automatically created asset settings on and use account-level negative keywords.
• I want good performance, but there are certain pages that I don’t want to send traffic to → Leave automatically created asset settings on and use URL exclusion rules.
• I can only send traffic to a single page as that’s the only path to conversion → Leave automatically created text assets turned on and turn off final URL expansion.
• I can only send traffic to a single page and cannot serve automatically created assets → Turn off automatically created assets (text assets and final URL).

Note: Final URL expansion can serve and receive traffic on any page that hasn’t been excluded. This means that if you have a subdirectory (like www.example.com/brand), your campaigns may be optimised to show both general and brand subdirectory pages.

URL exclusion

If you have pages that you need to exclude from sending traffic to, you can use URL exclusion or URL parameter rules. For example, if you don't want customers to be directed to non-commercial pages or sections of your website, you can exclude those pages using URL exclusions.

Note: Your campaign’s Final URL can’t be excluded from your Performance Max campaign using URL expansion exclusions. It will still be served and receive traffic if excluded. For example, if your campaign’s Final URL is www.example.com and you exclude www.example.com from URL expansion, www.example.com will still be served and receive traffic for your campaign.

If you wish to exclude your homepage from serving, you can choose a more specific landing page (such as www.example.com/page) and then exclude your homepage (www.example.com).

Exclude URLs

If you have specific URLs that you don’t want to include in your Performance Max campaign, you can enter these URLs individually and they won’t be served in ads (for example, your careers page).

Exclusion rules

If you have specific URLs or entire categories of your site that you don't want to present in your ads (for example, if you're discontinuing a brand and no longer want to advertise its products), then you can create a rule that includes www.domain.com/brand and excludes www.domain.com/brand/product1, www.domain.com/brand/product2 or any other pages you don't wish to be served in ads.

Instructions to exclude URLs

1. In your Google Ads account, click the campaigns icon .
2. Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click Campaigns.
4. Find the row with the Performance Max campaign that you'd like to edit, then click the gear icon to open 'Settings'.
5. Expand the 'Automatically created assets' section.
6. Select Exclude some URLs.
   • From this point, you will be able to add URLs to exclude or use rules to exclude URLs:
     • To exclude URLs: List the URLs that you want to exclude, then click Add.
     • To use rules: Click the 'Rules' tab to add the custom rules that you want to apply, then click Add.
7. Click Save.

For advertisers with a Merchant Center feed

For Performance Max campaigns with a Merchant Center feed attached, ads may be served to a URL provided in the campaign (final URL) or to a product included in the campaign from the attached Google Merchant Center.

Note: Automatically created assets can’t be applied to Shopping ads.

• If automatically created assets are turned on: Search ads may be served to additional URLs besides the provided final URL domain. Shopping ads may serve optimised titles based on the user query, in addition to product URLs and product titles from the Google Merchant Center.
• If automatically created assets are turned off: Search ads will be served only to the final URL. Shopping ads may serve product URLs and product titles from the Google Merchant Center.
• Learn more about optimised titles.