About Performance Max campaigns

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Google Ads Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that lets you to access all of your Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. Performance Max complements your keyword-based Search campaigns to find more customers who convert across Google's channels such as YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Learn how to Create a Performance Max campaign.

Performance Max campaigns: General concepts video

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Performance Max drives performance based on your specified conversion goals, and delivers more conversions and value. Performance Max uses Google AI for bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. Your inputs empower these features, including your specific advertising objective such as CPA or ROAS target, creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds. Learn more about Performance Max setup & management.

Note: Performance Max appears as a campaign type selection if you select Sales, Leads, or Local store visits and promotions as your advertising objective.

On this page

Benefits
When to use Performance Max
Google AI
How Performance Max campaigns work
Performance Max campaigns FAQs

Benefits

Benefit 1, Unlock new audiences across Google's channels and networks.

Benefit 2, Drive better performance against your goals.

Benefit 3, Get more transparent insights.

Benefit 4, Steer automation with your campaign inputs.

Benefit 5, simplify campaign management and easily optimize your ads.

Find more customers who convert

Customize the goals that matter to your business and maximize conversions or conversion value.
Engage customers across Google's channels with Performance Max.
Google’s real-time analysis of consumer intent and preferences, combined with your audience signals, Performance Max unlocks new customer segments.

Increase campaign value

Data-driven attribution across channels optimizes for the most incremental touchpoints that drive customers to conversion.
Google AI makes more accurate predictions about which ads, audiences, and creative combinations perform best for you. Learn more About marginal cost optimization.

Gain rich insights

Performance Max asset reporting shows which creatives impact performance so you can optimize campaign creatives and increase ROI.
New insights, such as rising search trends, can help you understand changes in performance and inform your broader business strategy.

When to use Performance Max

Performance Max is the recommended option when:

Your business has specific advertising and conversion goals such as to increase online sales, or generate leads.
You plan to maximize 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.

Google AI

Note: Text customization was formerly known as Automatically created assets.

Google AI powers Performance Max to maximize your campaign’s performance. You add your unique expertise such as budget, business goals, and conversions that you want to measure. Google AI will then find potential customers for your goals and serve the most appropriate ad, with the optimal bid, to maximize campaign performance.

Smart Bidding combined with attribution technology helps to determine the best options for your campaign across all Google inventory and to determine bids on the auctions that have the highest probability of meeting your business goals in real-time. Google AI is enhanced when you add audience signals to your Performance Max campaign.

Text customization 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 customization in Performance Max campaigns.

Note: 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, description, and additional assets to match your landing page content.

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.

Note: Performance Max campaigns that use auto-generated videos may show customers who visit your landing page a different product than the one featured in your video. This difference may be caused when the product linked in your Final URL doesn’t match the product in your campaign videos. If you’d like to restrict the landing page and ensure that the product a customer clicks is the product that they viewed, limit the products shown in your asset groups to the most relevant landing page using product filters.

How Performance Max campaigns work

Performance Max uses Google AI to optimize bids and placements and drive conversions or conversion value for your goals. To improve campaign performance, you can provide inputs such as audience signals, including customer data, and high quality text, images, and videos.

To specify which conversions are most valuable to your business, apply conversion values and set value rules. You can also use account-level brand safety settings to exclude your ads from specific types of content.

How do Performance Max campaigns work with Search campaigns and keywords

Performance Max complements existing Search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting.
If a search query matches to an exact match keyword in your Search campaign, Google Ads prioritizes the Search campaign over Performance Max.
Search themes have the same prioritization as phrase match and broad match keywords. Learn more about keyword prioritization.
Your Performance Max campaign may sometimes show for branded keywords in your Search campaign, even if those keywords use exact match under certain conditions, such as when your Search campaign has a limited budget or uses stricter targeting. To prevent this overlap, use brand exclusions within Performance Max or add those keywords as negative keywords in your campaign.
You can further customize your Performance Max campaign with search targeting and control tools like:
- Keywordless targeting
- Final URL expansion or asset optimization
- Search themes
- Negative keywords
- Brand exclusions

For advertisers with online sales goals using a Merchant Center feed

Before you begin

Make sure your Merchant Center account is set up with the required product information, such as business details, tax information (US only), verified and claimed website, shipping settings, feed with all of your product information. Learn more about how to Sign up for Google Merchant Center.
Make sure your Google Ads account is linked to your Merchant Center account. Learn more about how to Link a Google Ads account to Merchant Center.
If your goal is to run a Shopping-only (feed-only) Performance Max campaign using your Merchant Center feed, you must completely skip adding any text, image, or video assets during the initial setup. After manual assets are added, the system enforces minimum asset requirements and they’re not able to be deleted later to return to a feed-only format.

Note: If you use a Merchant Center feed, you don’t need to provide creative assets to launch a Performance Max campaign. However, it’s recommended to provide creative assets so your campaign can serve across all available surfaces for optimal performance. Google Ads may auto-generate ads on your behalf.

How to integrate with third-party platforms:

Note:

You can create up to 100 Performance Max campaigns in your Google Ads account. To achieve the best performance, consolidate your Performance Max campaigns where possible.
In Europe, you can use Performance Max campaigns with any Comparison Shopping Service (CSS). The ads show on general search results pages and on any other surfaces the CSS opts into.

For advertisers with store goals

Here are some reminders for advertisers with store goals:

You can create a Performance Max campaign if you set up local contacts or directions as a conversion goal.
Advertisers who formerly used Local campaigns can continue to optimize to offline goals using Performance Max campaigns with no additional budget or inventory required.

For advertisers with travel goals

Performance Max for travel goals campaigns is the easiest way for hotel performance advertisers to serve across all Google properties. This allows advertisers to easily create property-specific asset groups and maximize their performance with Google Ads.

Learn more About Performance Max for travel goals.

Performance Max campaigns FAQs

Why is my Performance Max campaign not eligible for all inventory?

If you’re using Performance Max through Google Ad Grants, your campaign may not be eligible to serve on all inventory. New channels and inventory may come over time to help you drive results across all of Google.

What campaign-level controls does Performance Max have?

Performance Max has several campaign-level controls to help you achieve your goals:

Keywordless targeting
Final URL expansion or asset optimization
Search themes
Negative keywords
Brand exclusions

Learn more about Search targeting & controls for Performance Max.

What kind of reporting does Performance Max have?

Performance Max campaigns offer several reporting options depending on your campaign and goals. These include:

Learn more about Performance Max reporting.

What are Performance Max asset groups?

Google Ads Performance Max asset groups are a collection of creatives centered on a theme or target audience. Google Ads uses these assets to generate ads designed to achieve your campaign goals. Learn more about How asset groups work.

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