Performance Max Setup: Structure, Signals, Control

This post covers how to set up and control Performance Max. If you haven’t decided whether PMax belongs in your account yet, start with when to use Performance Max and when to avoid it.

What does Performance Max optimize for?

Performance Max is one campaign that serves across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps, plus Shopping when you connect a product feed, with one budget and one bidding goal (Google Ads Help). It optimizes for the conversion action you choose, at the value you report back.

That value decides everything. PMax does what you tell it. Feed it revenue and it chases revenue. Feed it profit and it chases profit. Feed it every form fill on the site and it will buy you a pile of junk leads.

The three levers you control

You can’t bid per keyword or hand-pick every placement. You still control the three things that decide the outcome:

1. The conversion signal. Which action counts, and what value you attach to it.
2. The inputs. Product feed quality, asset groups, audience signals and listing groups.
3. The boundaries. Brand exclusions, negative keywords, placement exclusions and location options.

An account structure that works for ecommerce

A simple pattern for ecommerce accounts:

• One PMax campaign per margin tier, not per product category. Products with a 60% margin shouldn’t share a budget with products at 12%.
• A separate brand Search campaign, plus brand exclusions on PMax, so PMax can’t claim credit for demand you already had.
• A generic Search campaign for the head terms you want explicit control over.
• One asset group per audience or product story, with distinct creative instead of the same five images recycled.

For lead generation, replace margin tiers with lead value tiers and get offline conversion imports running before you launch. Our Google Ads for lead generation page covers that setup.

Why the product feed matters more than creative volume

In Shopping-heavy PMax, the product feed does the targeting. Titles, product types and attributes tell Google which queries to match you to.

Feed fixes that pay off:

• Rewrite titles to front-load the terms buyers type, not internal SKU language.
• Fill product_type with the full category path (for example “Home > Women > Dresses > Maxi Dresses”). Google uses it to structure bidding and reporting in your campaigns (Merchant Center Help).
• Use custom_label_0 to custom_label_4 for margin tier, stock depth and seasonality. Google built these labels as filters for bidding and reporting in Performance Max and Shopping (Merchant Center Help).
• Keep GTIN and brand accurate. Google warns that products with missing or incorrect GTINs may have limited visibility (Merchant Center Help).

A clean feed usually moves performance more than a batch of new video assets. For more on feed and campaign structure for online stores, see our ecommerce PPC services.

Send profit as the conversion value, not revenue

The highest-impact change in most ecommerce accounts is switching the conversion value from revenue to profit. With ProfitMetrics or a server-side value adjustment, the value you send to Google becomes gross profit after cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and returns. Google also offers native gross profit reporting if you send conversions with cart data and add cost of goods sold to your Merchant Center feed.

The first weeks feel uncomfortable. Reported ROAS drops. Profit rises, because the algorithm stops buying high-revenue, low-margin orders to hit a target that never reflected reality. Target ROAS vs profit bidding walks through the switch and how to set the new target.

Set your target once you have two to four weeks of profit-based data, not before. Getting the values right is a tracking job before it’s a bidding job.

Which exclusions to set before you spend

Before a PMax campaign gets meaningful budget, apply:

• Brand exclusions for your own brand terms, unless brand defense is the campaign’s job. In PMax they apply to Search, Shopping and YouTube search inventory (Google Ads Help).
• Negative keywords for competitor names, job seekers, support queries and free-intent terms. You can add them at account level or, since January 2025, at campaign level (Google). In PMax they only affect Search and Shopping inventory (Google Ads Help).
• Placement exclusions and content suitability settings for sites, apps and content you don’t want next to your brand (Google Ads Help).
• Location option set to “Presence” instead of “Presence or interest”, the option Google recommends, so you only reach people in or regularly in your target area (Google Ads Help).

The location setting alone cleans up a lot of waste in accounts that serve a single country.

Which reports to check every week

PMax used to hide most of what it did. That changed in 2025: Google added a search terms report, channel performance reporting and asset metrics with impressions, clicks and cost (Google).

Build a weekly view, in Google Ads or Looker Studio, that shows:

• Spend, conversions and profit by asset group.
• Search terms, with week-over-week change, so you can add negatives.
• Spend and conversions by channel, to catch budget drifting into Display or YouTube.
• New versus returning customers.
• Product-level profit from your feed joined to Shopping performance.

If you can’t answer “which asset group made money last week?” in under a minute, your reporting isn’t finished.

A 30-day setup plan

• Week 1: fix the feed, define margin tiers and switch conversion values to profit.
• Week 2: rebuild campaign structure by margin tier and apply all exclusions.
• Week 3: hold budgets steady and let the campaigns learn. Google suggests waiting 2–3 weeks before you replace low-performing assets (Google Ads Help).
• Week 4: read profit by asset group, cut the losers and shift budget to the tiers that clear your target.

Performance Max punishes fiddling. Set it up with care, then leave it alone long enough to learn. If you want us to build or audit the setup, see our Google Ads management.

FAQ

Can you see search terms in Performance Max?

Yes. Google rolled out a search terms report for Performance Max in 2025 with the same detail as Search and Standard Shopping campaigns (Google).

Can you add negative keywords to Performance Max?

Yes, at account level and at campaign level. They only apply to the Search and Shopping inventory PMax serves on, not to YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail or Maps (Google Ads Help).

How many asset groups should a PMax campaign have?

One per distinct audience or product story. More asset groups with the same creative split your data without giving the algorithm anything new to test.

How long should you wait before judging Performance Max?

Give a new campaign at least a few weeks without major edits. For a formal test, Google recommends running experiments for at least 4–6 weeks, longer if you have a long conversion delay (Google Ads Help).