Google is making some welcomed changes to it’s all-in-one ad campaign format, Performance Max. The changes largely revolve around giving advertisers more of the fine-tuning controls they’re used to from other Google Ads campaign formats, such as negative keywords, demographic targeting and device targeting. Currently, these campaigns are essentially built around you guiding the ad platform on your targeting and letting algorithms do the rest. The planned changes allow more options to constrain your targeting. When used thoughtfully, these tools can help advertisers reduce their wasted spend and more consistently reach the right audience.
Reporting is also seeing some enhancements. Performance Max campaigns have slowly added new reporting features, but advertisers and analysts have been begging for more. Most reports are auto-generated insights, that tell you about trends and recommendations, but leave out the necessary details to make judgements about why changes are happening.
In instances where more detail is given, it’s difficult to connect it to action. For example, the “Search term insights” report added almost two years ago seemed like a welcome addition with more transparency about your ad placements. The trouble is Performance Max doesn’t use traditional keywords, so there’s no way to make an apples-to-apples connection between this data and targeting changes an advertiser might make.
A new report being added is a Search Theme report. With Search Themes being a targeting option in these campaigns, this report should allow advertisers to make much clearer decisions about which Search Themes to keep, expand on or remove.
Google Ads reps are sharing a more complete 2025 roadmap with advertisers, and it appears more changes are planned that will continue moving the campaign format forward.
I’m optimistic these changes will result in the ability for advertisers to meaningfully impact performance on their campaigns but disappointed it took this long. Performance Max has been the primary focus for Goolge Ads in terms of both trying to push adoption but also resources for enhancements. As Google pushes more and more resources into Performance Max, it becomes more important they make it a worthwhile investment for advertisers. If results are inconsistent, or fears/conspiracy linger around accuracy of reporting, it certainly opens the door for advertisers to test out ad networks outside of Google.
We’ve seen good but often not amazing results with Performance Max. My shorthand assessment is the campaigns tend to perform better when you constrain them a bit with narrower targets. But it quickly becomes a challenge to avoid overlap across campaigns. It appears the coming changes will make it easier to control this and limit how often one campaign is “stealing” customers from another.
