How much control you keep in Performance Max

Google I/O runs today, Google Marketing Live is on 24 May, and anyone who has sat through either one in the past few years can write the headline in advance: more automation, fewer inputs, trust the system. Last month Google backed that up with something less abstract than a keynote slide. The self-upgrade tool opened, so Smart Shopping and Local campaigns can be moved into Performance Max with a few clicks, and Google has said those upgrades become automatic later this year.

Performance Max has been available to everyone since November. Most of the local accounts we run have now tested one, and the reps are calling weekly to ask about the rest. So the question worth answering before Marketing Live gives everyone a fresh round of enthusiasm is a practical one. If you put budget into this campaign type, what do you still get to decide?

What Performance Max takes off your desk

One campaign serves across Search, Maps, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Discover. You do not choose the split, and you cannot turn a channel off. You do not add keywords. You do not see a search terms report the way you do in a search campaign, only the insights Google chooses to show you, grouped into categories.

Audiences work differently too. What you upload or build is an audience signal, which is a suggestion about where to start looking, not a limit on who sees the ad. Google has been clear about this and advertisers still misread it every week.

Reporting is the part that catches local owners out. When a practice owner asks “where did these leads come from”, the honest answer in a Performance Max campaign is thinner than it used to be. You can see the campaign, the asset groups, some asset-level guidance and a set of insights. You cannot reconstruct the path the way a search campaign lets you.

What you still control, and it is more than people think

The levers that remain are the ones that were always doing the heavy lifting:

• Budget and bid target. Nothing has changed here. The campaign will spend what you let it spend, at roughly the cost per acquisition or return target you set.
• What counts as a conversion. This is the biggest lever in the whole product and it belongs to you. Performance Max optimizes toward whatever you tell it success looks like.
• Location targeting. Including the setting for whether you are targeting people in your area or people merely interested in it, which is worth checking on day one because the default has cost more local accounts more money than any other setting in Google Ads.
• Assets. Your images, your video, your headlines, your feed if you have one. The campaign is assembling from what you give it, and most local accounts give it stock photography and a logo.
• Final URL expansion. Leave it on and Google can send traffic to pages you did not intend. On a small local site, we turn it off.
• Negative keywords at the account level, which for now still means asking a rep to apply them rather than adding them yourself.

None of that is nothing. It is just less fun than writing ad copy.

Where it goes wrong in a local account

The failure we see most often is not the campaign type. It is the conversion definition underneath it.

If a form view, a click on a phone number, a visit to the contact page and a completed booking all count as conversions with the same value, the campaign will chase the cheapest of those, because that is exactly what you asked it to do. It will find people who click phone numbers and do not call, and it will report a very impressive cost per conversion while the schedule stays empty. In a search campaign with keywords you would notice within a week. In Performance Max you notice at the end of the month.

The second failure is geography. A dental practice with a fifteen mile catchment and a campaign targeting “presence or interest” in the metro area will get leads from an hour away that will never sit in the chair.

The third is assets. Performance Max on Maps and YouTube puts your business in front of people in a visual format, and the businesses we see doing well with it have photographs of their actual premises, their actual staff and their actual work. A logo on a color block is not a campaign.

How we are running it for local clients

We are not moving whole accounts across, and we are not refusing to use it either.

For a local service business the search campaign still holds the money terms. Exact and phrase match on the searches that describe the job you want, with negatives, with a page per service, and with the reporting that lets you answer questions. That campaign is not broken and it is not being taken away.

Performance Max goes on top of it, with its own budget, once three things are true: conversion tracking counts booked calls and completed forms rather than intentions, the business profile and the site have real photography to feed it, and there is budget available that the search campaign is not already using at full impression share. Run that way, it has found volume for clients that search alone was not reaching, particularly on Maps and YouTube.

Where a Smart Shopping or Local campaign is still running, we are doing the upgrade ourselves rather than waiting for it to happen automatically, so we get to set the conversion goals and the asset groups instead of inheriting whatever the migration decides.

What to do this month

• Open your conversion actions and mark only the ones that represent a real booking as primary. Everything else moves to secondary.
• Check the location setting on every campaign and set it to people in your targeted locations.
• Turn off final URL expansion unless you have a large site with pages worth discovering.
• Put real photos and at least one short video of the business into any Performance Max asset group before adding budget.
• Ask your rep to apply account-level negative keywords for the terms you never want, starting with jobs, salary, DIY and the services you do not offer.
• If a Smart Shopping or Local campaign is still live, upgrade it on your own schedule rather than letting the automatic migration choose the settings.

Automation is not the problem. Automation pointed at a badly defined goal is the problem, and that part has not been taken away from anyone. If you want another set of eyes on it, Google Ads is where we spend most of our week, the profile and photos a campaign feeds on are usually the cheapest fix, and the pages the clicks land on decide whether any of it turns into a booking.