Step 1: Create your campaign and choose a goal

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 March 2025, the business name and logos from the top performing asset group from your campaign will be used. Learn more About brand guidelines.

A common goal among advertisers is to encourage customers to visit your physical storefront and to showcase products available at nearby stores. This article explains how you can optimize your Performance Max campaigns with local inventory ads to drive offline visits and sales with a linked Merchant Center account and feed.

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 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

• Make sure your Merchant Center account is set up with required product information like business details, tax information (United States only), verified and claimed website, shipping settings, and a feed with all of your product information.
• Make sure your Google Ads account is linked to your Merchant Center account.
• Automatically created assets can’t be applied to Shopping Ads.

Instructions

If you’re using a Merchant Center feed, 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. Click the plus button , then select Campaign.
2. Under “Choose your objective, select Local store visits and promotions.
3. Select Performance Max as your campaign type.
4. Select your Merchant Center account and country or feed label where products are sold.

5. Enter a campaign name.
6. Select Continue.

Keep 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 optimized towards both phone calls and website actions, you can set the value for phone calls as your average sale order value. Automation will optimize for goals with the highest ROAS.
• Performance Max only supports the account-level or campaign-level tracking template: Any tracking template at the lower level, such as ad group or product group, will be automatically removed.