Paid Media · Service 10

The campaign type
most agencies misuse.

Performance Max done by senior practitioners. Asset group strategy, audience signals, conversion value hierarchy, exclusion lists. The campaign type that compounds brilliantly with the right inputs and catastrophically with the wrong ones.

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70%+
of Google Ads spend now flows through PMax for typical retailers
6
inventory channels · Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps
€15K+
minimum monthly PMax spend · economic threshold
The Thesis

Performance Max is a black box that produces what you feed it. Feed it generic creative, weak audience signals, and gross-revenue conversion values — it returns generic performance. Feed it differentiated creative, profit-weighted signals, strict brand exclusion lists, and customer-match audience seeds — it returns disproportionately good outcomes. The inputs are the discipline.

site architecture
What we actually do

Where the algorithm is
only as smart as the brief.

Performance Max replaced manual campaign management for most Google Ads advertisers — and most accounts now run 70-80% of total spend through PMax. The campaign type works brilliantly when fed correctly and catastrophically when fed badly. The control surface for advertisers shrunk dramatically; the importance of strategic configuration grew dramatically.

The work is now upstream of the auction. Asset group structure, audience signal seeding, conversion value hierarchy, brand-list exclusions, search-theme guardrails, customer-match seed lists. Each of these is a single configuration decision that compounds across millions of impressions. Most agencies fill in the defaults; we treat each decision as strategically consequential.

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What's included.

Every Performance Max engagement covers four pillars. Each pillar is a deep dive — not a checklist tick.

i. Architecture

Asset Group Strategy

How asset groups should be structured around your business model — by product margin, by audience segment, by funnel stage, or by brand line. Wrong structure causes algorithm confusion; right structure produces directional optimisation.

ii. Signals

Audience Signal Seeding

Customer match audiences from your CRM, in-market segments aligned to your category, your-data audiences from converted users, lookalikes from highest-value customers. The signals that bias the algorithm toward your buyers, not generic in-market traffic.

iii. Values

Conversion Value Hierarchy

Margin-weighted conversion values, value-based bidding configuration, offline conversion uploads from CRM data, lifetime value modelling. Most accounts feed PMax gross-revenue values that bias toward low-margin commodity buyers.

iv. Exclusions

Brand & Negative Lists

Brand exclusion lists (preventing PMax from cannibalising organic brand traffic), negative keyword lists (now possible at account level), placement exclusions (the MFA-site list), audience exclusions for converted customers. The guardrails that prevent budget leakage.

How a Performance Max engagement unfolds.

i. Audit

PMax diagnostic

Two-week audit of existing PMax setup. Asset group structure, audience signals quality, conversion value implementation, exclusion lists, brand cannibalisation patterns. Most accounts have all five wrong by default.

ii. Configure

Strategic setup

Rebuild PMax around correct asset group architecture, refined audience signals, margin-weighted conversion values, and complete exclusion lists. The configuration phase that decides whether the campaign type compounds or leaks.

iii. Feed

Creative asset library

PMax requires diverse creative inputs — headlines, descriptions, images, videos, sitelinks, callouts. Production cadence to keep the asset library fresh. Statistical thresholds for kill decisions on underperforming assets.

iv. Refine

Continuous tuning

Monthly review of insights data (search themes, audience patterns, asset performance). Quarterly architecture review. Customer-match list refresh. PMax compounds with deliberate ongoing curation.

compounding vs leaking
Why it matters

Where defaults
destroy budgets.

Two retailers running PMax campaigns on €60K monthly spend. Account A accepted Google's default suggestions: single asset group, generic audience signals, gross-revenue conversion value, no exclusion lists. Account B configured strategically: margin-weighted conversion values, customer-match audience seeds, complete brand exclusion list, asset groups segmented by product profitability. Same platform, same budget — Account B produces 2.6× the ROAS.

Performance Max became Google's default campaign type because Google's algorithms work better than manual management for most advertisers. But the algorithms work brilliantly with strategic configuration and poorly with default configuration. The agencies still selling "PMax management" without doing the upstream strategic work are selling theatre.

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case study image
Representative case · Premium Homeware Brand

A premium homeware brand was running Performance Max at 3.4× ROAS — accepting Google's default configuration. Strategic reconfiguration lifted it to 8.1× on the same budget.

A premium homeware retailer had migrated from Standard Shopping to Performance Max under their previous agency, accepting Google's default setup throughout. ROAS sat at 3.4× with no clear path to improvement. We rebuilt the PMax architecture: asset groups segmented by product margin, customer-match audiences from their highest-value buyers, margin-weighted conversion values, complete brand exclusion lists preventing organic cannibalisation, and a refreshed creative asset library. Eight months later: 8.1× ROAS on the same monthly spend, €2.4M incremental annual revenue.

Representative scenario · not a named client engagement
8.1×
ROAS · up from 3.4×
€2.4M
Incremental revenue
€0
Additional spend
See a related engagement →

Two previous agencies told us our Performance Max performance was "as good as the platform allows." Revolutionize spent two months on architecture and audience signals — no creative changes, no spend changes — and lifted ROAS from 3.4× to 8.1×. The lesson: PMax is only as smart as what you feed it.

M
Marie-Claude Devereaux
Head of Digital · Premium Homeware Brand

Questions worth asking.

For most retailers and considered-purchase B2C brands: yes — Google has effectively made PMax the default and the platform optimises better through PMax than through Standard Shopping or Search alone. For B2B with long sales cycles, niche audiences, or strict brand-safety requirements: more carefully — sometimes Standard Shopping plus Search Ads outperforms a misconfigured PMax. The honest answer depends on category and configuration.
Less manual control, more algorithmic optimisation. PMax runs across all Google inventory (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps) using machine learning to allocate budget. The advertiser controls strategic inputs (assets, audiences, conversion values, exclusions); the algorithm controls auction-level decisions. The discipline shifted from bid management to strategic configuration.
Less than with Standard campaigns, more than two years ago. Google has gradually expanded PMax reporting — search themes, audience insights, asset performance ratings. We layer on top: weekly placement audits, query-level analysis from search-themes data, and incremental lift testing where required. PMax requires accepting some opacity, but the dark spots are dramatically smaller than they were in 2022.
Yes — by default, often catastrophically. PMax will happily bid on your brand terms unless explicitly excluded. We add account-level brand exclusion lists in the first week of every PMax engagement, which often produces a 15-30% efficiency lift before any other configuration work. The exclusion lists are a now-standard PMax feature most agencies still don't configure.
PMax management typically integrates into broader Google Ads engagements rather than running as a standalone service — €4,000-€12,000 per month for the broader account. Standalone PMax engagements: €3,500-€8,000 monthly. Initial 60-day audit and reconfiguration phase: €5,000-€15,000. Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute scoping call.

Pairs beautifully with.

Performance Max is most powerful when followed by these complementary services.

Paid Media · 01

Google Ads

Performance Max integrates with Search, Shopping, YouTube and Display in the broader Google Ads ecosystem. We typically manage PMax as part of unified Google Ads programmes rather than in isolation.

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Paid Media · 07

Google Shopping

For retailers, Performance Max for Retail is the dominant Shopping campaign type. Feed quality, custom labels, and product profitability segmentation drive PMax outcomes more than algorithm decisions.

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Paid Media · 05

YouTube Advertising

YouTube inventory is one of six channels Performance Max accesses. Video creative quality is increasingly the differentiating input for PMax performance.

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Reconfigure the algorithm

Ready to feed PMax
better inputs?

Book a 30-minute scoping call. We'll review your current Performance Max setup, identify the architectural and signal issues most likely suppressing performance, and quote a possible engagement with no obligation.

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