Performance Max is open to every advertiser

Yesterday Google made Performance Max generally available to every advertiser. It has been in beta since the Marketing Livestream announcements last year, and most local accounts never saw it. Now it sits in the campaign type list next to Search and Display, and the reps are already calling to ask why you have not turned one on.

Before anyone does, it is worth understanding what this campaign type actually consumes, because for a local business a large part of it is your listing.

What Performance Max is

It is one campaign that serves across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps from a single budget. You do not build ad groups or choose keywords. You give Google a goal, a budget, audience signals, and asset groups: headlines, descriptions, images, logos and video. Google assembles and places the ads and decides which surface gets the money.

For local businesses the interesting part is the goal options. Alongside leads and sales, you can optimize for local actions: calls, direction requests and store visits. Those goals pull directly from your linked Google My Business locations. The campaign can show your business on Maps, with your hours, your photos and your categories attached.

That is the trade. You give up keyword control and you get every Google surface at once, including the one your customers already use to decide where to go.

Why this lands on your listing

A Search campaign can succeed while your listing is a mess. Performance Max cannot, at least not on the local goals, because the listing is the ad.

Here is what we check before we let one of these campaigns run for a client with a physical location:

• Hours, including the holiday hours. Thanksgiving and the weeks after it are the season when listings lie to people. A campaign paying to send someone to a closed office is worse than no campaign.
• Primary category. It decides which local searches you are eligible for at all, and it is still the most under-examined setting on most listings we inherit.
• Photos that are yours. Exterior, interior, team, parking. Performance Max will use listing imagery and whatever assets you upload, and stock photography in a local ad is obvious to the person looking at it.
• The services list and the description, written with the words patients use rather than the words on the practice brochure.
• Location assets connected in the ad account, and every location claimed and verified. An unverified location is invisible to this campaign type.
• Call tracking on the listing number, so the calls this generates land somewhere you can count them.

None of that is new advice. What is new is that neglecting it now costs you paid performance as well as organic reach.

What we are not doing yet

We are not moving whole budgets into Performance Max this month, for three honest reasons.

First, control. There are no campaign-level negative keywords. If your account has a history of irrelevant search terms, the only lever is the account-level negative list you have to ask Google to apply, and for practices with a common word in the business name that is a real risk.

Second, reporting. The insights available today do not tell you which surface produced which result in the detail a Search campaign gives you. You can see asset performance and some audience data. You cannot slice it the way you are used to.

Third, timing. December is not the month to hand a new campaign type a learning period. Dental practices are heading into the end-of-year benefits push, and home services businesses are in heating season. The campaigns that carry that revenue should be the ones already trained.

What we are doing is running Performance Max as an addition, on a separate budget, in accounts that already have clean conversion tracking and a healthy Search campaign. Google has also said the existing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will be able to upgrade into it, so anyone running a Local campaign should expect this conversation to become mandatory rather than optional at some point next year.

The order we would do it in

1. Fix the listing first. Hours, holiday hours, category, photos, services, and every location verified.
2. Confirm conversion tracking counts calls and booked appointments, not form views. Performance Max optimizes toward whatever you tell it success looks like, and it will do so faster than a manual campaign.
3. Keep the Search campaign running at its current budget. Fund the test separately.
4. Build one asset group per real service line, not one per keyword idea. Give it a video, even a short vertical one shot on a phone, because Google will make a poor one if you do not supply anything.
5. Set audience signals from your own customer lists first, then interests.
6. Leave it alone for a few weeks. Judging it on week one is how people conclude a campaign type does not work.

What to do this month

• Open your listing today and set holiday hours for Thanksgiving and the December closures, before anyone is on vacation and cannot remember the schedule.
• Check your primary category and your services list against what you actually sell right now.
• Upload four photos taken this season. Exterior, front desk, team, and one of the thing people are nervous about.
• Verify that every location in your ad account is linked and verified.
• Decide whether you are testing Performance Max now or in the new year, and if now, fund it separately from the campaigns carrying your end-of-year revenue.
• Put a reminder in for early December to review the first three weeks of results, and do not touch it before then.

The pattern in Google’s last year of announcements is consistent: fewer levers inside the ad account, more weight on the assets and the business information you supply. That makes the unglamorous work the work that decides the result. Keeping your listing accurate and complete is now part of running Google Ads well, and the rest of it is the same local SEO hygiene we have been arguing for since before any of this was automated.