Performance Max is a goal-based Google Ads campaign type: one budget serves ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and Smart Bidding decides where to spend it. Across the three Italian Google Ads accounts we manage, between September 2025 and August 2026, it paid €0.19 per click against €1.81 on Search, but converted less than half as often: 0.67% against 1.54%.
You can find that definition anywhere. On 28 October 2026 we read the UK guides on the first page for "performance max": Click Consult, Max Web Solutions, Colne Digital and Bind Media. Only two show figures from a real account, and those are a 2024 Smart Shopping test and one anonymised £500-a-month example. None of the four mentions the channel performance report, and two date from 2024, before Google added campaign-level negatives at scale, the search terms report and the channel performance report.
Those three features now decide whether a Performance Max campaign spends well or badly.
In the accounts we inherit, the mistakes look the same every time:
- Performance Max switched on from day one, with not a single real conversion to learn from;
- no brand exclusion, so the campaign buys searches for your own name;
- conversions that count technical events, with a cost per conversion that looks like a bargain.
Two public cases show what we mean.
Contesini Consulenze, two energy advice offices in the province of Mantua, started from zero: tracking and local Search first, Performance Max later. The result: 299 enquiries at €7.20 each, and 68% became sales opportunities.
Sunscape, which develops solar and agrivoltaic plants, had a Google Ads account in 2024 that counted 1,487 "conversions" in one month at €0.61 each. They were technical events, not enquiries.
So what does that have to do with Performance Max?
It is the campaign that optimises towards those conversions. If they are fake, it spends the budget producing more of them.
In this guide you will find:
- how it works and where the money really goes, with figures from our accounts;
- the table of controls added in 2025 and 2026, with dates and limits;
- when it pays off and when it does not, for ecommerce, local businesses and B2B lead generation;
- how to set it up, with asset requirements taken from the Google Ads Help Centre;
- how to read the results without being fooled by cost per conversion.
Let's start.
How Performance Max works (you give it a goal and material, Google picks the placement)
Performance Max works the other way round from a Search campaign: instead of keywords, you give it a conversion goal, a daily budget, text, images, video and, if you sell online, a Merchant Center product feed. Smart Bidding then bids in every auction based on the likelihood of a conversion, as the Google Ads Help Centre explains.
There are four ingredients:
- the goal: sales, leads, website traffic or store visits;
- asset groups: headlines, descriptions, images, logos and videos, which Google combines into different ads for each channel;
- audience signals: customer lists, site visitors, interests (a hint, not a restriction);
- search themes: up to 50 per asset group since August 2025, up from 25.
What about keywords?
There are none.
One rule protects you if you already run Search: when a search matches an exact match keyword, Google prioritises the Search campaign over Performance Max. Search themes, by contrast, carry the same priority as phrase and broad match, according to the same Google page.
That is why, in the accounts we run, Search stays on for the searches that matter most even after Performance Max arrives. Contesini reached €7.20 per enquiry with two campaigns in sequence, not with one.
Where the ads appear (and where the budget really goes)
Performance Max ads can show on Search and search partners, Shopping, YouTube, the Display Network, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Google moves the budget towards the channels where it predicts the best return, and billing changes by placement: per click on Search, Shopping and Display, per thousand impressions (CPM) for YouTube in-stream ads, according to Google's page on Performance Max costs.
You can see the effect in the data from the three Italian accounts we manage, already published in our Google Ads statistics: same twelve months, same accounts.
| Network | Spend | Impressions | Clicks | Avg. CPC | CTR | Conversion rate | Cost per conversion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search | €115,984 | 464,045 | 63,936 | €1.81 | 13.78% | 1.54% | €117.80 |
| Performance Max | €29,825 | 3,768,282 | 156,077 | €0.19 | 4.14% | 0.67% | €28.64 |
Performance Max delivered eight times the impressions of Search on a quarter of the spend, and each click cost almost ten times less.
So it converts better?
No. The lower cost per conversion (€28.64 against €117.80) tells you the conversions are of a different kind. A click from Discover or a Display banner comes from someone who was not searching for your service, which is why the conversion rate is less than half.
To see where the spend goes there is the channel performance report: under "Insights and reports" it shows cost, clicks and conversions for each channel, with data from 6 June 2025 onwards (Google Ads Help). Since January 2026 it also breaks out Google search partners.
From the same page: a channel can show zero spend without anything being wrong, because Performance Max prioritises the channels with the highest predicted return.
What you can control today (the table most guides are missing)
In 2022 Performance Max was a black box. Across 2025 and 2026 Google added the controls that change how you manage it, announced on 7 August 2025 in a Google Ads Help post and summarised on 8 December 2025 in Google Ads highlights of 2025.
| Control | Since | Limit or detail | Inventory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Campaign-level negative keywords | 2025 | up to 10,000 per campaign (previously 100) | Search and Shopping |
| Shared negative keyword lists | August 2025 | one list applied to several campaigns | Search and Shopping |
| Brand exclusions | not dated | your brand or a competitor's, with misspellings and sub-brands | Search and Shopping |
| Search terms report | August 2025 | same detail as Search and Standard Shopping | Search |
| Channel performance report | data from 6 June 2025 | cost, clicks and conversions by channel | all channels |
| Search themes | August 2025 | from 25 to 50 per asset group | Search |
| Device and age targeting | August 2025 | all campaigns; gender is in beta | all channels |
| Full asset statistics | 2025 | impressions, clicks, cost and conversions per asset | all channels |
The row that changes the job most is the first one. Before 2025 the cap was 100 negatives per campaign (Search Engine Land). Now you can add 10,000, as in a Search campaign.
And what still can't you do?
- choose keywords and match types: there are only search themes;
- exclude search partners with a checkbox, as in Search: you are left with account-level placement exclusions;
- keep your ads out of the space around AI Overviews: there is no exclusion.
Google itself calls negative keywords in Performance Max a highly restrictive control, and for your own name it recommends brand exclusions. Our approach: brand excluded from Performance Max and handled by a dedicated Search campaign, negatives only for searches that will never bring a customer (jobs, courses, "free").
When Performance Max pays off (and when it burns budget fastest)
Performance Max pays off when the account already has real conversions, enough for Smart Bidding to learn. In our accounts the threshold is 30 real conversions a month, orders or enquiries rather than page visits: below that we start with Search or Standard Shopping.
Case by case:
- ecommerce with a clean feed: this is where it performs best. On Scovaventi and Bosatta Shopping and Performance Max cover the catalogue while SEO builds the categories (details in Google Ads for ecommerce and Google Merchant Center);
- local businesses: link it to your Google Business Profile so it adds Maps. At Contesini it came after a base of local campaigns already at €7.20 per enquiry;
- B2B lead generation: the trickiest case. If the conversion is a form, it learns to bring forms, including from people who will never buy: you need different values for qualified enquiries or an import from your CRM (Google Ads for B2B).
And on a small budget?
With no data to learn from, it moves spend to wherever clicks are cheapest: for a small business we start with Search for two or three months (Google Ads for small business).
Then there is the problem that costs the most. Back to Sunscape. After the 1,487 "conversions" of 2024, from May to November 2025 the same account spent €1,500 a month with zero conversions tracked. Another solar company, Valore Solare, recorded 15,267 conversions from 5,467 clicks in a single month.
More conversions than clicks?
Exactly. A Performance Max campaign fed with that data spends the whole budget producing more technical events, and the report says everything is fine. At Sunscape, with tracking rebuilt from scratch, Google Ads brought in 144 enquiries in 2026. Tracking is the first job of our tracking service, consent included (Consent Mode v2).
Is your Performance Max learning from real enquiries?
You have just seen how an account that counts technical events makes Performance Max spend its budget in the wrong place. We start there: we check what your account counts, where the money goes channel by channel and how many searches for your own brand the campaign is buying.
Book a strategy callHow to set up a Performance Max campaign (six steps and the minimum assets)
You create it in Google Ads under "New campaign", choosing the goal and then Performance Max. Beforehand you need the Google tag with verified conversions, a Merchant Center feed if you sell products, and material for one asset group. The steps:
- goal and conversions: keep as primary only the actions that matter (purchase, enquiry, call), not visits to the contact page;
- budget and bidding: "Maximise conversions" or "Maximise conversion value", with optional target CPA or target ROAS;
- settings: locations, languages, brand exclusions, Final URL expansion;
- asset group: text, images, logos, video, audience signals and search themes;
- negative keywords at campaign level, before publishing;
- review: ads go through a check that takes "a few days", according to Google's getting started guide.
The minimum assets, from Google's page on asset groups:
| Asset | Minimum | Maximum | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Headlines | 3 | 15 | 30 characters, at least one within 15 |
| Long headlines | 1 | 5 | 90 characters |
| Descriptions | 2 | 5 | 90 characters |
| Landscape (1.91:1) and square (1:1) images | required | 20 images in total | 1200×628 and 1200×1200 recommended |
| Square logo | 1 | 5 logos in total | 1200×1200 recommended |
| Video | optional | the page gives two different figures | 10 to 60 seconds |
If you do not upload a video, Google may generate one from your other assets: better to upload your own. And with Final URL expansion on, Google can send the click to another page and write dynamic headlines that you remain responsible for: pages such as "careers" should be excluded.
Performance Max, Search, Shopping or Demand Gen (which campaign for which job)
- Search: when you know which searches matter and want to choose them yourself. With exact match it wins over Performance Max;
- Standard Shopping: to launch an ecommerce store while the feed and tracking are being fixed, then for bestsellers;
- Performance Max: from 30 real conversions a month, to add YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail to the same budget;
- Demand Gen: to create demand on YouTube, Discover and Gmail with more control over placements. If video is your main channel, start with our guide to YouTube ads.
The mature accounts we manage keep Search on the searches that matter most and Performance Max on the rest.
How to read the results (three numbers that mislead)
Three numbers in the report deserve suspicion:
- the account's average CPC: if you see €0.66, as ours would be adding up the two networks in the table, Performance Max is dragging the average down. Always split Search and Performance Max;
- ROAS with your brand inside it: without a brand exclusion a Performance Max campaign can show a ROAS of 8 while half the sales come from people who would have searched for you anyway;
- cost per conversion: read it alongside what the account counts as a conversion. Valore Solare's 15,267 are the lesson.
That is why the first check on an inherited account is the search terms report: how many searches contain the company name. If there are many, ROAS is inflated.
Performance Max and AI answers (what happens around AI Overviews)
In the UK, as in Italy, ads from Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns already appear above and below AI Overviews, which run in more than 200 markets. Inside the answer is different: ads there are available only in English and in twelve countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia but not the UK, and you can neither target nor opt out of that placement, according to Google Ads Help (the UK picture is in ads in AI Overviews).
An ad does not get your site cited inside the answer, though. That is an organic choice, made from the pages Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity can find and understand. There is one overlap: with Final URL expansion, Performance Max also picks the landing page based on the search. A page that answers a precise question serves both the ad and the citation, and for the organic side there is our work on visibility in AI answers.
Frequently asked questions
No. Without real conversions to learn from it moves spend to wherever clicks are cheapest. In our accounts we add it from 30 real conversions a month.
Yes. Since 2025 you can add up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign, including shared lists, and they apply to Search and Shopping inventory. For your own name Google recommends brand exclusions.
Yes. PMax is short for Performance Max, the Google Ads campaign that uses one budget across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
No. Performance Max has no equivalent of the checkbox in Search campaigns. You are left with account-level placement exclusions and the channel report, which has shown search partners separately since January 2026.
It depends: it works if the account can tell a qualified enquiry from any form fill, with different values or conversions imported from your CRM. If it only counts forms, it learns to bring forms, including from people who will never buy.
It depends: Google does not give a duration. The bid strategy status shows "learning" in the initial period, which lasts longer when conversions are few.
In short
One budget across seven channels.
Clicks cost less; conversions are not worth the same.
Since 2025: negatives, search terms and channel reporting.
First 30 real conversions a month, then Performance Max.
Brand excluded, Search on the searches that matter.
One idea to take away: with the 2025 controls Performance Max stopped being a black box, but it became a campaign that reads whatever you feed it. The work has moved from the account to the website: tracking, feed and landing pages. Whoever fixes those first gets from Performance Max what everyone else blames on the algorithm.
If you want us to look at your account this way, start with our Google Ads management.
