Launched in November 2021 as Google’s all-singing, all-dancing answer to a problem that people weren’t complaining about, Performance Max has been received with plenty of scepticism by the digital marketing community. While Performance Max has lowered the bar when it comes to the required expertise to manage a cross-channel marketing campaign, enabling smaller businesses to more easily scale their online presence, seasoned digital marketers have critiqued it as a ‘blackbox’ and an overreach from Google to marginalise digital agencies in favour of their own AI-powered solutions. Much of this criticism revolves around a lack of transparency, a lack of control and perhaps most cynically, a way of selling under-used inventory such as display and video ads.
For me, this is one of the most dangerous elements of PMax; a false assumption that anyone can successfully run a Performance Max campaign with little to no digital marketing experience by leveraging automated bidding, automated asset creation and automated ad placements. Once things start to go slightly off-track it can feel like you need a clairvoyant to demystify what is happening, and with reduced signals and levers to help steer a campaign back on course, the inexperienced can find themselves racking up increasingly high media spend bills with little return to show for it.
However, this latest batch of updates announced in January 2025 do appear to be a step in the right direction, as Google take steps to address some of the concerns held by digital marketers. So, what has changed…?
Is Performance Max Now Giving Marketers Greater Control?
Arguably the biggest frustration with Performance Max has been the lack of control in managing said campaigns. The Q1 2025 updates are changing this in several ways:
Campaign-level negative keywords
One of the biggest bugbears since the get go, we finally get the ability to set negative keywords at a campaign level. While it was possible to request support assistance to set negative keywords at a campaign level, marketers themselves were limited to being able to only set account-level negatives. Whether controlling irrelevant keywords or searches unsuitable for your brand values, this is a highly requested feature that has been long overdue and is greatly welcomed.
Brand exclusions for different formats in retailer campaigns with product feeds
Brand exclusions can now be applied to both Search and Shopping ad formats separately, allowing advertisers to apply brand exclusions for example to Search ads within a PMax campaign, while keeping brand searches triggering Shopping ads for their products. This can allow advertisers to maintain high value product placements in the Shopping ribbon for brand searches but exert greater control over how your branded Search ads appear.
Demographic & Device Targeting
Currently only in beta, but potentially the most impactful update to targeting controls, depending on your brand (well, target audience). The changes to demographic targeting will let you set exclusions based on age brackets such as “18-24” or “65+” and the devices beta enables the targeting of computer, mobile or tablet traffic. You will need to reach out your Google Ads account team or Google Ads support to gain access to these trials though.
High Value Customer Acquisition Targeting
Having previously introduced the ability to exclusively target new customers, last year’s beta for high value customer targeting is now also being rolled out to all Google Ads users. This not only allows marketers to define what a high value customer is but also set different bidding priorities for high-value new prospects, regular new customers and existing ones. By leveraging Google’s AI and your own first-party data you’ll be able to not only bid more aggressively for new users but focus on those with a higher lifetime value. Reporting will also be available at a campaign-level. The value of this update will depend heavily on the quality and depth of the first-party data you provide to Google, which may be a sticking point for many SMEs.
“URL contains” rules for campaigns with product feeds
Using rules you’ll now be able to target traffic to specific pages and categories on your website. This makes isolating and targeting certain product categories, or collections much easier. Application and use of this feature will vary depending on your website’s URL structure (duh!) and the quality of your product feed. A high-quality product feed making good use of custom_labels can allow for more than adequate product segmentation, however this change will alleviate some of the pressure on careful use of custom_labels, considering they are limited in number (5).
So What?
These changes do give digital marketers a level of increased control over Performance Max campaigns by helping them to reduce wasted spend (campaign negatives, demographic & device targeting, brand exclusions) while also potentially focusing spend on more profitable audiences and searches (high value customer targeting, demographic & device targeting). One of the biggest frustrations with PMax has often been a lack of control over the traffic being generated, with the main lever for optimisation being increasing or reducing a ROAS target, so these changes do represent a step in the right direction.
Improved Optimisation
A lack of insights into what is actually happening under-the-hood with Performance Max has been a sore point for many since their inception. Again these 2025 updates look to address some of those concerns…
Search terms insights source column
One of the feedback loops that Performance Max provides is the ‘search categories’ found under the Insights tab in Google Ads. This new search term insights update now adds the context how search categories are being associated with your campaign. For instance, is Google returning your adverts for certain searches because of your campaign creatives? The product’s landing page? Or perhaps the search themes you added upon campaign creation? It will certainly be interesting to gain greater information into the how and why elements of which search queries are triggering and then leveraging that data via campaign-level exclusions if appropriate.
Search themes usefulness indicator
Further to understanding how or why Google is associating a search category with your campaign Google will now also provide an indication of the ‘usefulness’ of the search themes that have been set for a campaign. It is worth mentioning here that Google is reporting on whether these search themes are “driving incremental traffic, on top of what Performance Max would find on its own”, which is open to question as to whether that is actually ‘useful’. Understanding which search themes are driving incremental conversions would have been preferable from our perspective!
Improved asset group reporting
Another long-requested feature, but the details being provided here by Google are a little light on the ground. The “ability to segment your asset group performance” to allow for more methodical asset testing and experimentation would be met with open arms, but “you can break down your results more granularly, including seeing conversions by device, time and more”, sounds like a piecemeal rollout of features that many expected at launch in 2021. I won’t be holding my breath that this delivers what is being loosely promised and until we see this in action it’s and understand how we can utilise the data to drive improved performance.
So What?
Whereas the control elements discussed earlier in this blog do fill me with some positivity, these optimisation-related updates feel largely irrelevant and just playing at the edges of what will make a difference to a campaign’s profitability, which is typically the goal of optimisation in this instance. The obfuscation of search term data within Performance Max versus what we had access to with Shopping campaigns remains a huge source of frustration and knowing that the algorithm is displaying our ads because of a product URL or the creative assets associated with it is not moving the needle for me. At all. Compounding that by clueing me in on what search themes are driving more traffic doesn’t float my boat either. While there is certainly a time and a place for brand awareness, driving increased traffic and grabbing a greater mind share, for many SMEs advertising online their priority is, and should remain, generating a profit.
Final Thoughts
There are definitely some positives to takeaway from these updates, with campaign-level negatives leading the way. Regardless, many of the pre-existing concerns around Performance Max remain. It’s still largely an AI black box that requires you to trust Google’s AI bidding algorithm and optimisation decisions. PMax campaigns will continue to generate low quality video ads and buy clicks on the display network with your dwindling media budget when greater efficiency could have been achieved by focusing on Shopping ads. While there is a time and a place for Performance Max campaigns in a brand’s digital marketing output, they shouldn’t be the first, or only, route to market.
A more nuanced approach that considers the maturity of not only your business but digital infrastructure too in guiding a phased, scalable and most importantly, profitable, use of your digital budget will have the most desirable results. If that sounds like something that would interest you, we offer a free audit of your Digital Marketing Maturity and provide a framework and recommendations on how to grow your business. We’d love to hear from you and help you take the next step.
