What do you hand over, and what do you keep?
You hand over the placement. In a search campaign you choose keywords and Google matches searches to them. In Performance Max you give Google asset groups (headlines, descriptions, images, videos and a logo, grouped by theme), optional audience signals that hint at who your customers are, and the conversion actions that count as success. Smart Bidding then bids in every auction on the chance of a conversion, and you can set a target cost per acquisition or return on ad spend.
You keep three things. The conversion goal, which is the one setting that steers everything else. The assets, which decide what people see. And the exclusions: Google lists brand exclusions and negative keywords as the controls for blocking searches you do not want. Since 2022, Performance Max has also been where Google's old Smart Shopping campaigns went, so for an online shop with a Merchant Center feed it is often the default campaign.
Why can Performance Max look better than it is? (example figures)
Because it is paid on the conversions it can claim, and the cheapest conversions to claim are people who were already coming. An online swimwear label on the Gold Coast spends $3,000 a month on Performance Max with its Merchant Center feed connected. The owner adds a brand exclusion for the label's own name and compares the month before with the month after.
| Spend | Revenue Google Ads reports | Reported ROAS | Total online sales in the shop | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before the brand exclusion | $3,000 | $18,000 | 6.0 | $41,000 |
| After | $3,000 | $11,400 | 3.8 | $40,200 |
The reported return fell by more than a third. The shop's sales hardly moved. About $6,600 of the revenue Performance Max had been reporting came from people searching the label's name, who found the shop anyway through the free listing underneath. The $3,000 now goes on people who had not heard of the label, which was the reason for advertising in the first place. The real question about any Performance Max result is how much of it would have happened without the campaign, and the shop's own sales report is where that answer starts.
When does Performance Max suit an owner-sized business?
When conversion tracking is right and there are enough conversions for Smart Bidding to learn from. An online shop with a clean product feed and purchases tracked with their value is the common fit. A trade business that tracks every click on the phone number as a conversion is the poor one: Performance Max will find plenty of people who tap the number by accident, and report each one as a success. Fix the tracking before you hand Google the wheel.
What does CoraVision read from a Performance Max campaign?
CoraVision reads a Performance Max campaign the way it reads any other once Google Ads is connected: spend, clicks, impressions, conversions and conversion value, budget and bidding type, every night. At launch it also reads Google Merchant Center, the products in your feed and how each performs. Cora reads them beside the purchases and revenue Google Analytics 4 records, and the Trust Score on the dashboard shows how far the reported numbers can be trusted.
Questions
Can Performance Max run without a product feed?
Yes. A business that wins work through enquiries can run it with images, headlines, descriptions, a logo and a landing page. Without a Merchant Center feed it has no products to show in Shopping results, and it leans on the assets you gave it.
Will Performance Max take over my search campaign?
Google says that when a search is identical to an exact match keyword in one of your search campaigns, the search campaign gets priority. For everything else, both can compete for the same search, which is one reason to read each campaign's results side by side.
Can I stop it bidding on my own business name?
Yes. Brand exclusions and negative keywords are campaign-level controls in Performance Max, and Google lists them as the way to block searches you do not want it on. Add your business name if your reported results lean on people who were already looking for you.