Performance Max is a campaign type that changed the face of Google advertising. These campaigns allow advertisers to show their ads across multiple Google channels simultaneously from a single campaign.

Performance Max (PMax) campaigns have had a big impact on how advertisers sell products for ecommerce businesses because they completely replaced smart shopping campaigns (SSC) back in 2022. Because of this, we all have no choice but to adjust to this campaign type.

This article will walk you through how to build out a PMax campaign manually from scratch.

Step 1: Choose Your Campaign Goal

To create a Performance Max campaign, you must choose one of the eligible campaign goals. The PMax campaign option will not appear for the other campaign goals.

If you’re running a PMax campaign for a lead generation business, choose “leads” as your campaign objective in most cases. If you’re running this campaign for an ecommerce business, choose “sales” as your primary objective.

Next, choose the conversion goals that you want to use. If you already have conversion tracking set up on your campaigns, they will automatically be displayed for you to choose from. Click continue and select your campaign type to move on to the next step.

Step 2: Connect Google Merchant Center (Ecommerce Only)

The next step is to select your Google Merchant Center (GMC) account to sync to your campaign. If you already set one up for your ecommerce store, it will automatically be selected for you to use. If you’re advertising for a lead gen business, you can disregard this step.

Name your campaign, then click continue to move on.

Step 3: Set Your Bid Strategy and Daily Budget

PMax campaigns only allow you to choose one of two bid strategies:

Maximize conversions, with a target CPA option
Maximize conversion value, with a target ROAS option

There are a few different ways to determine which one to choose here, but generally in most cases, you’ll choose max conversions if you’re a lead gen business and max conversion value if you’re an ecommerce business.

PMax campaigns tend to perform best when you give them a reasonable budget to use for ad spend. Based on our experience with running PMax, they don’t seem to generate reasonable results without a decent budget. Frederick Vallaeys is of the same belief, and he recommends assigning a minimum budget of $100 for this campaign type.

Step 4: Locations, Language, and Final URL Expansion

The next step is to choose your location targets and your language setting based on what your customers speak.

Below that, you’ll find a feature that is specific to PMax campaigns called “final URL expansion.” If this option is enabled, Google will replace the Final URL of your ad with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query and intent. Google will automatically update the headline for each ad to match search intent, and drive users to the best landing page for a conversion.

Step 5: Build Your Asset Group

The next part of the setup is the asset group section, where you upload all your ad content for the campaign to use. You get up to:

20 images
5 logos
5 short headlines and 5 long headlines
5 descriptions

You should fill in every one of these asset pieces if you can, so Google will have plenty of content to rotate across all its channels.

Once all your assets are filled in, you can choose what kind of call to action (CTA) you want for your ads. The CTA can be automated, or it can be chosen manually from the available options. If you have a static CTA (e.g. buy now for ecommerce), consider choosing the CTA that is most relevant to your business.

Step 6: Create Audience Signals

The last major part of this campaign setup is all about creating audience signals for your campaign. According to Greg Finn, an author at Search Engine Land, audience signals can help to jumpstart your PMax campaign, and they will also inform you throughout the lifecycle of the campaign. Performance Max will use these signals as a starting point, but then it will expand beyond these signals to find new traffic and conversions across Google.

There are three types of signals to fill in:

Custom segments are audiences you build yourself, targeting people based on their search activity, app downloads, or website visits.
Your data is where you add audience signals for past website visitors and Customer Match Lists.
Interests and demographics is where you add the standard audience segments that are typically used for regular search campaigns.

It’s best to fill all the available segments with audiences to give your campaign as many targets to go after as possible.

Step 7: Add Ad Extensions and Launch

The last step of the PMax setup is to create the ad extensions (now called assets in Google Ads) that are typically used for Google Ads accounts. The ones available for you to use are sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, lead form, price, promotion, and call extensions.

Once you’ve set up the appropriate ad extensions for the campaign, launch Performance Max and begin managing this unique campaign type.

Performance Max 101: How to Set Up a Campaign From Scratch