Performance Max campaigns are a cornerstone of many Google Ads strategies, offering broad reach and automated optimization. However, advertisers have often sought greater transparency and more granular control over these powerful tools. In response, Google has been consistently rolling out a series of enhancements designed to provide deeper insights, more refined targeting capabilities, and improved creative management within Performance Max. This post will explore these key updates for 2025 and what they mean for maximizing your campaign effectiveness.
PMax in 2025: More Than Just a Pretty Interface
While earlier UI updates like graphical ad strength indicators and direct edit buttons in the asset group table view offer improved at-a-glance optimization, Google is continuing to enhance Performance Max with more comprehensive reporting, like channel performance and search terms reporting.
Channel Performance Reporting: Understanding Cross-Channel Impact
A significant update is the rollout of channel performance reporting. This feature aims to provide clarity on how Performance Max campaigns are performing across Google’s various channels, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Advertisers will be able to see a campaign-level summary and visualizations illustrating where ads are engaging customers and how each channel contributes to conversion goals. For example, strong performance on YouTube might prompt a greater focus on video asset development. The open beta for this feature reportedly began rolling out around May 2025.
Search Terms Unveiled: Gaining Clarity on Audience Queries
Finally, full search terms reporting is making its way to us, complementing the existing Search terms insights. This means you get the same level of granularity as you do in your standard Search and Shopping campaigns. Armed with this data, you can craft new text assets targeting high-performing terms or judiciously apply campaign-level negative keywords if you spot irrelevant queries.
Enhanced Asset Reporting: Get Granular with Your Creatives
Google is also improving asset reporting to display detailed metrics for individual assets. This offers a more profound understanding of which specific images, headlines, or videos resonate with audiences and which may require optimization. Existing features already allow for reviewing asset group details and a “Combinations” report showing top-performing asset combinations across various channels.
Key Performance Max Changes: A Recap
Google has been actively releasing numerous features throughout late 2024 and into 2025, aiming to make Performance Max a more powerful, controllable, and transparent advertising tool. Reports indicated that in 2024 alone, over 90 quality improvements led to an average increase in conversions and conversion value by more than 10% for advertisers using Performance Max.
Here’s a summary of other important enhancements:
- Strengthened Campaign Controls:
- Expanded Negative Keywords: The limit for campaign-level negative keywords has substantially increased from 100 to 10,000, offering significantly more control over ad serving. This is being rolled out to all advertisers.
- Brand Safety: Options for brand exclusions for various formats in retailer campaigns with product feeds are now available. Additionally, “URL contains” rules for campaigns with product feeds provide more control over product ad placements.
- Targeting Precision: Demographic exclusions and device targeting options have been added for more refined audience reach. For more on refining your PMax audiences, check out our guide on how to create Performance Max audience signals that convert.
- Brand Guidelines: For new PMax campaigns, business name and logo assets are becoming mandatory to ensure brand consistency.
- Smarter Goal Setting & Bidding:
- Customer Lifecycle Goals: Retention goals are now fully available, enabling more effective bidding for lapsed customers and allowing advertisers to specify customers with higher lifetime value.
- New Customer Acquisition Focus: The new customer acquisition goal now includes a “high value mode”. Furthermore, the new customer acquisition cost can be viewed directly in campaign reporting.
- Advanced Creative Tools & Asset Optimization:
- AI-Powered Asset Creation: Google is leveraging its AI, including Gemini models, for improved text asset generation within PMax, like long headlines and soon, sitelinks. Image generation is also getting an upgrade with Imagen 2 to help create lifestyle imagery showing people in action. As we’ve covered before, Performance Max Generative AI assets are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Asset generation is rolling out globally in English, with more languages to follow.
- Ad Strength Recalibration: Asset quantity and variety now carry more weight in determining Ad Strength for PMax campaigns, reflecting their importance across diverse channels and formats.
- Image Controls: Images can be automatically sourced from landing pages, and image enhancements can help create additional versions of existing images.
- Video’s Importance: Advertisers who include at least one video in their PMax campaigns observe an average increase of 12% in total additional conversions. PMax can use images from Merchant Center feeds to create auto-generated videos, and this capability is expanding.
- External Platform Integration: Google is expanding partnerships, starting with Canva, to simplify publishing images directly into PMax campaigns.
- Shopping Campaign Coordination:
- When running Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns concurrently for the same products within the same account, Performance Max will no longer automatically receive prioritization. Instead, Ad Rank will determine which campaign serves an ad, aligning PMax’s interaction with other campaign types like Demand Gen.
- Additional Reporting & Insights:
- Search Themes Usefulness Indicator: This feature provides more guidance on the effectiveness of your search themes, a topic we delved into in our article on Search Themes for PMax: What You Need to Know.
- Asset Group Performance Data: Advertisers now have the ability to segment and download asset group performance data for more in-depth analysis.
ADDEN’s Hot Take: Navigating the New PMax Landscape
The continuous evolution of Performance Max, with its emphasis on increased data availability, enhanced controls, and smarter AI, presents significant opportunities for advertisers to refine campaigns and achieve better results. These updates are part of Google’s “Power Pack,” their next-generation suite of AI-powered campaign solutions developed for the modern, multi-modal search environment.
Our Pro Tips for Leveraging PMax Updates:
- Utilize New Data Streams: Actively engage with the new channel performance reports and search term data. Analyze this information to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
- Conduct Regular Asset Audits: Given the enhanced asset reporting and the increased importance of asset quantity and variety, routinely review and refresh your creative elements. Explore AI generation tools, test lifestyle imagery, and ensure sufficient video content.
- Exercise Control Features: Implement the expanded negative keyword lists and brand safety features to guide the AI, ensuring your ads are displayed in appropriate contexts and to relevant audiences.
- Leverage First-Party Data: Utilize Customer Match and GA4 integration. Your first-party data is invaluable for informing PMax about your most important customers and tailoring campaigns effectively.
- Test, Test, Test: Whether it’s asset experiments, different bidding strategies for customer lifecycle goals, or new audience signals, continuous testing is the name of the game. And of course, try to avoid some of the 8 common mistakes in setting up Performance Max campaigns.
The future of Performance Max looks increasingly transparent and controllable, which is fantastic news for advertisers. It’s clear Google is listening to feedback and committed to making PMax a go-to solution for achieving diverse marketing objectives.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all these PMax updates, or just want to ensure your campaigns are firing on all cylinders? That’s where we come in! At ADDEN, we live and breathe this stuff. Our expert PPC Management services are designed to take the complexity off your plate and drive the growth your business deserves. We’d love to chat about how we can help you harness the full power of Performance Max.
What are your thoughts on these PMax enhancements? Have you started seeing these new reports and features in your accounts? Drop a comment below – we’d love to hear your experiences and insights!