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Specialist service

Performance Max Consultant

Performance Max is useful and easy to misread. Jaseel M sets it up with the controls that stop it reporting your existing customers as new revenue.

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In brief

A Performance Max consultant makes Google's most automated campaign type accountable: excluding brand searches so PMax does not claim sales you already had, splitting asset groups by product group, setting targets from real margin, using new-customer goals, and reading channel and search-term reports to see what it is buying. Most "PMax is not converting" problems are setup or tracking problems, not campaign-type problems.

Why Performance Max needs controls

Performance Max runs one campaign across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and optimises towards whatever conversions you give it. Left alone, it gravitates towards the cheapest conversions available — and in most accounts those are people already searching for your brand or already in your remarketing lists. The campaign reports a strong ROAS; the business sees no extra sales.

None of that makes PMax bad. It makes it a campaign type that needs a person setting boundaries.

How I set Performance Max up

  • Brand exclusions so brand searches go to a separate, cheap brand campaign and PMax is judged on demand it actually creates.
  • Asset groups split by product group — matching how customers shop, each with its own creative and audience signals.
  • Listing groups following the margin-based custom labels in the feed, so high- and low-margin products are not averaged together.
  • Search themes used to steer, and account-level negative keywords for terms you never want to pay for.
  • New-customer acquisition goal where the store passes customer data, so you can see and value genuinely new customers separately.
  • Targets from margin, not from last month's ROAS. See how to set a target ROAS from your margin.
  • Channel and search-term reporting checked monthly, so "what is PMax buying?" has an answer.

Performance Max not converting? Check these first

Symptom Usual cause
Spend with almost no conversions Conversion action not firing or set to secondary; feed products disapproved; budget spread across too many asset groups
Great ROAS, flat sales Brand and existing-customer traffic being claimed — check brand exclusions and new-customer reporting
Performance swings after every change Learning reset by frequent edits to budgets, targets or assets
Spend going to video and display Weak feed or narrow product coverage, so the system looks for inventory elsewhere
Only a few products get impressions Normal concentration plus no product-level structure; split listing groups by label

If a campaign is new or recently changed, give it time before judging: how long Performance Max takes to settle explains what counts as genuinely broken.

When Performance Max is the wrong tool

  • Very small budgets, where one campaign cannot gather enough data to learn.
  • Products with a long consideration cycle and no reliable conversion signal.
  • Accounts with broken tracking — PMax will optimise very efficiently towards the wrong thing.

In those cases standard Shopping and well-structured Search usually do better, and I will say so.

Is Performance Max worth it for e-commerce?

Usually, as part of an account rather than the whole account. With brand exclusions, margin-based structure and clean tracking it finds incremental sales; without them it mostly re-labels sales you would have had anyway.

How long before Performance Max works?

Typically two to six weeks to settle after launch or a significant change, depending on conversion volume. Frequent edits restart that clock.

Frequently asked questions

Can I see search terms in Performance Max?

Partly. Search-term insights and the search terms report show categories and terms, and channel performance reporting shows where spend goes. It is less detail than Search, but enough to steer.

Should Performance Max replace Standard Shopping?

Not by default. Running both with a clear split — PMax for scale, Standard Shopping for control on specific product groups — is often better than either alone.

Do you audit existing Performance Max campaigns?

Yes. A PMax audit is part of the Google Ads audit, or can be done on its own.

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