Google Performance Max (PMax)
What is Google Performance Max (PMax)?
Google Performance Max (PMax) is a campaign type that takes one set of assets and one goal and runs ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps and the Display network. Google decides where they appear and who sees them, learning from your tracked conversions and your product feed. You get reach and automation in exchange for less hands-on control than a search campaign gives you.
Example
A children’s furniture shop spends €1,500 a month on search campaigns at a ROAS of 3.5. It adds Performance Max with the same budget. A month later PMax reports €9,000 of revenue on €1,500 of spend: a ROAS of 6.
The number changes once you ask where it came from. Forty per cent of that revenue sits on searches carrying the shop’s own name — queries it already wins without paying. Strip them out and €5,400 remains on the same spend, a ROAS of 3.6. So before any comparison we exclude brand searches and look at what happened to the shop’s total revenue, not only to the campaign’s own report.
Why it matters for a business
Performance Max hands the decisions to automation: it picks the channel, the audience and the combination of text and image. That works when the account feeds it honest data — conversions tracked with values, a clean product feed, enough assets. If a visit to the contact page counts as a conversion, automation will buy exactly that.
For a shop the feed is a stronger lever than ad copy: titles, categories and images decide which searches you appear on at all. For a service business PMax is riskier — with no products and no order value, the goal collapses into a count of enquiries, and enquiries differ in quality.
What to ask
- Does the site send a value with every order, not just a count?
- Are brand searches excluded, and are campaign-level negative keywords in place?
- What do the channel and search-term reports show us, and what stays hidden?
- What are we comparing against: a period without PMax, or the campaign’s own numbers?
- Is a separate search campaign still running on our core keywords?
We set PMax up alongside the feed and the conversion tracking, as part of Google Ads.