Performance Max
One campaign running across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover and Maps. You supply assets and signals. Google assembles the ads and decides where to show them.
That trade is the whole point of PMax and the whole risk of it. You get reach you could not buy channel by channel, and you give up most of the control over where the money goes.
Plans: Performance Max campaigns are an Early Access feature. See Pricing.
Creating one
Choose Performance Max from Ad Launcher, then Campaigns.
Campaign
Name and daily budget. The naming placeholder suggests a shape like FR_PMax_AllProducts_2026. Follow it: PMax campaigns multiply, and unnamed ones become unreadable fast.
Bidding
Maximize Conversions by default. When you bid to a return, enter the Return-on-ad-spend multiplier as a multiple, not a percentage, so 3.5 means 350%.
If the account has no conversion tracking, Adsap warns you before you continue. Take the warning seriously: conversion-based bidding with nothing to optimize toward still spends the budget.
Asset group
Everything Google builds ads from.
- Headlines and Long headlines. Long headlines appear in the larger layouts. They are not a longer version of the same line.
- Descriptions.
- Images, plus a logo, from your creative library.
- YouTube videos, optional, by video ID or uploaded through Adsap.
- Final URL, your business name, and a Call to action.
- Final URL expansion, which decides whether Google may send traffic to pages on your site other than the one you gave it.
Give it more assets than feel necessary. PMax works by combining them, and a thin asset group produces a few repetitive ads.
If you have no video, Google generates one from your images. It tends to be poor. One real video is the cheapest quality improvement available here.
Signals
Search themes and audience signals point PMax at the people you think will convert.
They are hints, not targeting. Google is free to go outside them, and does. A search theme does not stop the campaign serving on something unrelated, and a PMax campaign has no keyword-level control.
Audience signals come from the account’s saved audiences, created in Google Ads under Tools, then Audience manager. Adsap lists what the account already has. It does not create them.
Targeting
Locations to target, Excluded locations, and Languages.
Excluded locations matter more here than elsewhere. A campaign with this much freedom finds traffic in places you did not intend unless you rule them out.
Validate and create
Validate checks the campaign against Google without creating anything, and shows exactly what Google objects to. Use it: PMax has more required fields than any other type here, and finding out at creation time is slower.
The campaign starts paused. Activate it from the dashboard when you are ready.
Worth knowing before you run one
PMax and standard Shopping compete on Ad Rank for the same products. Since late 2024 Google no longer prioritizes PMax automatically. If you run both, Ad Rank decides which campaign serves, and Shopping priority settings only order Shopping campaigns among themselves. See Shopping.
Google limits the reporting by design. You cannot see performance by placement or by search term the way you can on a Search campaign. The search terms view shows what it can, which is less than for Search.
Asset automation is a separate setting. Whether Google may generate text and enhance your assets comes from Enhancements, applied at creation.
Give it time before judging it. PMax needs a learning period, and turning it off after a week tells you little. That is also why automation rules apply a learning guard.
Through the AI Copilot
You can create PMax campaigns by chat. The assistant shows you a preview of the full structure, including the asset group, before it creates anything, and everything it creates starts paused.