Is Performance Max worth it? I get asked this a lot, usually by someone who’s either been told it’s the future of Google Ads or been burned by it already.
My answer is yes, quite often, provided a few things are in place first. Without them, it’s one of the fastest ways I know to spend a lot of money and come away with a report that looks lovely and explains nothing.
So here’s Performance Max in plain English: what it does, where it works, and what I’d want sorted before I let it anywhere near your budget.
What Performance Max actually is
Performance Max is Google’s automated campaign type. Instead of running in one place, a single campaign can show your ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps.
You give it the ingredients: your product feed if you’re a shop, plus images, headlines, descriptions and some signals about who your customers are. You tell it what you want, usually sales or enquiries. Google’s automation then decides where to show your ads, to whom, and how much to bid each time.
That’s the appeal. Less manual work, more reach, and a system that can make far more bidding decisions in a day than any person could.
It’s also the risk. You’re handing over a lot of decisions, and Google gives you much less visibility into what it’s doing with your money than you’d get from a normal search campaign.
Why it matters commercially
The automation is very good at hitting whatever target you give it. That sounds reassuring until you realise it will hit a bad target just as enthusiastically as a good one.
If your account tells it that a page view is a conversion, it’ll find you plenty of page views. If it’s counting sales twice, it’ll think it’s doing twice as well as it is and keep going. If it can pick up cheap conversions from people searching for your business by name, it’ll happily do that and take the credit.
None of that shows up as a problem in the report. It shows up months later, when the business looks at its sales figures and wonders why they don’t match.
Where Performance Max works well
In my experience it does its best work for online shops with a decent product range and a clean product feed.
That’s where it earned its place at the Royal Armouries online shop. The shop sells everything from books and replica armour to collection-inspired gifts and official film merchandise. That’s a varied range, and showing the products themselves to people who are actively searching for them makes a lot of sense. When I rebuilt the account, setting up Shopping and Performance Max campaigns was a core part of the work.
It can work for service businesses too, but I’m more cautious there. Without a product feed, it leans much more on your images and text, and the quality of the enquiries it brings in needs watching closely.
The four things I’d want in place first
1. Tracking you can trust. Performance Max learns from conversions. It looks at what a sale looks like and tries to find more. If your tracking is incomplete or inaccurate, it learns the wrong lessons and then applies them at scale.
At the Royal Armouries, the first priority wasn’t launching any new campaigns. There were gaps in conversion tracking, so I fixed that so every online sale was recorded and attributed properly, and only then built on top of it. I’ve written about the tracking problems I find in most accounts, and if you take one thing from this post, make it this: don’t launch Performance Max on shaky tracking.
2. The right goal. Ask what the campaign has been told to optimise for. “Conversions” is a weaker answer than “revenue”, and “revenue” is weaker than profitable revenue. If you sell products with very different margins, telling Google to chase revenue alone can steer budget towards the things you make least on. It helps to know what a good ROAS looks like for your business before you set a target.
3. A clean product feed. For a shop, the feed is your ad copy. Google uses your product titles, descriptions and categories to decide which searches each product shows up for. Vague titles and missing details mean your products appear for the wrong searches, or not at all.
4. Search campaigns alongside it. Performance Max doesn’t make search campaigns redundant, whatever you may have heard. At the Royal Armouries, the rebuild also included restructuring the search campaigns and rewriting the ad copy. The campaign types do different jobs, and a well-built account uses them together.
Questions to ask about the Performance Max you already have
If you’re already running it, these are fair questions to put to whoever manages it. Anyone good will be able to answer them without getting twitchy.
→ What share of its conversions came from people searching for our brand name?
→ What is it optimising for, and why that rather than revenue or profit?
→ Which conversions is it learning from, and have we checked they’re real?
→ How is it performing against our break-even return, rather than just last month?
→ Can you show me which products or asset groups are taking most of the spend?
That first one matters most. People who search your business name were probably going to find you anyway, and a Performance Max campaign picking up those sales can look brilliant while bringing in very few new customers. I come back to brand searches in my nine checks for your Google Ads.
Don’t let it become a black box
What worries me most about Performance Max is a business where nobody understands what it’s doing with their money.
Part of my work with Commercial Marketing Manager Joanna Harrison and her team at the Royal Armouries has been explaining the different ad types, how they work and why each decision is made. In Joanna’s words, I helped her “better understand the different types of ads and how they work.” For a campaign type that relies so heavily on automation, that understanding matters. It means the team knows what the campaigns are doing, so they can manage them day to day instead of simply hoping.
Year on year, return on ad spend on Google Ads is up 141% for the shop, and the same budgets are working significantly harder. Performance Max is part of that. So are the tracking fix, the search campaigns, the ad copy and a team that understands the account. I’d be overselling it if I put the result down to one campaign type.
What to do this week
Ask what it’s optimising for. One email, one answer. If it’s “conversions”, ask what those are and whether they’re all real sales or enquiries.
Ask for the brand share. Find out how much of your Performance Max revenue came from people who searched your name. If it’s a big chunk, the campaign isn’t doing as much as the report suggests.
Look at your product feed with fresh eyes. Pick ten of your best sellers and read the titles as if you were a customer. Would you know what the product was and who it’s for? If not, that’s an afternoon’s work that will help every Shopping and Performance Max campaign you run.
If you’re thinking about Performance Max, or you’ve got one running and aren’t sure what it’s really doing, book a free consultation and I’ll go through it with you. You’ll get a plain-English answer and a clear view of what I’d fix first.