Paid Media · Service 10
Technical SEO Audit. Performance Max done by senior practitioners. Crawlability, indexability, Core Web Vitals, schema, internal architecture — examined with surgical rigour, prioritised by commercial impact.
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.
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.
Every audit covers four pillars. Each pillar is a deep dive — not a checklist tick.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Monthly review of insights data (search themes, audience patterns, asset performance). Quarterly architecture review. Customer-match list refresh. PMax compounds with deliberate ongoing curation.
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.
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.
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.
A technical audit is most powerful when followed by these complementary services.
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.
Explore →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.
Explore →YouTube inventory is one of six channels Performance Max accesses. Video creative quality is increasingly the differentiating input for PMax performance.
Explore →Reconfigure the algorithm
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.