Step 1: Create your campaign and choose a goal

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).

Business names and logos are part of your brand guidelines. This migration allows you to control how your brand appears in ads on Performance Max campaigns. To keep using your preferred business name and logos for your campaigns, add the assets to your brand guidelines. If no updates are made by mid-April 2025, the business name and logos from the top performing asset group from your campaign will be used. Learn more About brand guidelines.

If you're a retailer, you can use Performance Max campaigns to promote your online and in-store products, help boost traffic to your website or local shop and find better qualified leads. Learn more About Shopping Ads.

This article explains how to add products from a linked Merchant Center account to your Performance Max campaign. Learn more About feeds.

Performance Max is powered by Google AI to generate campaign settings that help you get more value from your advertising. As you create your campaign, you may receive notifications about issues that could affect performance. Use the campaign construction navigation menu to review and resolve these issues. Learn more about how to set up your campaign for success.

Tip: If the goals in this article don’t match the campaign goals that you’ve set up in Google Ads, Google provides additional Performance Max campaign creation options. Learn more about other ways to create a Performance Max campaign.

Before you begin

Note: Text customisation was formerly known as automatically created assets.

• Make sure that your Merchant Center account is set up with required product information like business details, tax information (United States only), verified and claimed website, delivery settings and all of your product information.
• Make sure that your Google Ads account is linked to your Merchant Center account.
• Text customisation can’t be applied to Shopping Ads.
• You can't change the Merchant Center account after the campaign is created. If you need to use a different account later, you will have to create a new campaign.

  Learn how to use feed labels to advertise products from specific product data sources.

Instructions

If you’re advertising products from Merchant Center, follow the steps below to create a Performance Max campaign. If you’re unfamiliar with conversion tracking, review Set up conversion tracking for your website before you set up your goals.

1. In your Google Ads account, click the create button , then select Campaign.
2. Choose 'Sales', 'Leads', 'Website traffic', 'Local shop visits and promotions' or 'Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance' as your campaign objective.
3. After you confirm your conversion goals and select Performance Max as your campaign type, you can click Continue.
   • Note: Your account goals will be automatically populated, but you can remove the default goals, or add new goals based on your desired outcome.

4. Select your Merchant Center account and, if applicable, country or feed label where products are sold. Learn more About feeds.
5. Enter a campaign name.
6. Select Continue.

Bear in mind

• Update or remove irrelevant or stale goals: You should update conversion goals to improve performance and to avoid continually removing them from your targeted goals. Click the 3-dot icon to edit or remove irrelevant goals or go to 'Conversions' to update your account-level conversion goals.
• Set conversion values: Set conversion values for different goals or when each conversion is worth a different amount to your business. For example, if your campaign is optimised towards both phone calls and website actions, you can set the value for phone calls as your average sale order value. Google AI will optimise for goals with the highest ROAS.

Note: Starting in June 2026, Google Ads is updating how bidding strategies are labelled. 'Maximise conversions with a Target CPA' is changing to 'Target CPA' and 'Maximise conversion value with a Target ROAS' is changing to 'Target ROAS'. While the names that you find might differ slightly during this transition, the underlying bidding behaviour remains exactly the same. You won't need to take any action in your account as a result of these changes.

Learn more about Changes to how Smart Bidding strategies are organised for search campaigns.