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Jan 23, 2025
New controls and reporting improvements are coming to Performance Max.
In 2024, we launched a suite of powerful Performance Max features centered around improving controls and reporting capabilities. Performance Max gives you the full power of Google's channels and AI, all in one campaign to maximize your performance. In 2025, we’ll continue growing Performance Max in several key areas to help you improve results and gain more transparency into what’s driving performance. Start the year strong with these new features:
Last year at DMEXCO, we introduced the beta for campaign-level negative keywords, which allow you to exclude specific queries you don’t want to show ads on for brand suitability or other reasons. This much-requested feature is now rolling out to all advertisers in the next few weeks.
You can also improve how you use Performance Max to prioritize winning new customers using new customer acquisition goals. Last year, we introduced a beta for high value new customer mode, which is now rolling out to all advertisers. With this new feature, you can specify your high-value customers and the long-term value they represent through Customer Match. Google AI will use your data to predict which new users are likely to maximize lifetime value for your business and bid more for them. Reporting is also available at the campaign-level so you can see how many new customers your campaign is driving, and how many were high value new customers.
For retail advertisers with product feeds, you’ll soon get better control over how brand exclusions work across different ad formats. Previously, brand exclusions applied to both Search and Shopping ads. You’ll now be able to apply brand exclusions to just Search text ads, while keeping branded traffic for Shopping ads. This can be especially useful if you value showing Shopping ads for brand terms, but may want to manage Search text ads for brand terms in a different campaign.
“URL contains” rules, which are available in standard Performance Max campaigns, will be expanding to Performance Max campaigns with product feeds as well. You can use “URL contains” rules to target traffic based on specific page categories on your website. For instance, if you’re an athletic apparel store, you can target your campaign specifically to all pages on your site that have “shoes” in the URL.
And two exciting new betas are coming soon to Performance Max campaigns. First, a beta for age-based demographic exclusions will allow you to exclude age brackets, such as “18-24” or “65+”. Next, with our Devices beta, you can customize targeting to computer, mobile or tablet traffic. If you’re interested in either betas, reach out to your Google Ads account team or Google Ads support to sign up.
Richer and more detailed reporting is also landing in Performance Max this month. Previously, we introduced search themes in beta. Search themes let you indicate queries that you know your customers are using to look for you and are additive to the queries and placements Performance Max predicts will perform well based on your assets, feeds and landing pages. Thanks to your feedback, we’re now officially launching search themes with some major improvements. You’ll be able to use search terms insights to see whether queries are coming from Performance Max’s keywordless targeting or from the search themes you’ve added.
Use the new source column in search terms insights to see where your queries are coming from
You’ll also find an indicator next to your search themes that tells you how “useful” your search themes are. These new reporting insights will help you understand if the search themes you provided are driving incremental traffic, on top of what Performance Max would find on its own, or whether you’d benefit from updating your search themes.
Check out the search themes usefulness indicator to see if they are helping you improve your reach
Finally, we’re building on enhancements to asset group reporting. The ability to segment your asset group performance is rolling out now in all Performance Max campaigns. You can break down your results more granularly, including seeing conversions by device, time and more. We’ve also heard your feedback on how you want to be able to access and share this data outside of the Google Ads UI. That’s why asset group performance is now downloadable.
Stay tuned in the upcoming months as we continue to add other Performance Max improvements, including more types of controls, reporting and insights. Your feedback is critical in how we shape and implement these features to help you leverage the best of AI in Google Ads, so as always, keep your ideas coming!
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