Get started with Performance Max

This guide provides a checklist of concepts and tasks for each of the three Performance Max business goals to help you build your campaign. To get started, select a business goal:

Performance Max for online sales or lead generation (standard)

Performance Max allows advertisers to access all Google Ads channels and inventory from a single, unified campaign. The steps to create a standard Performance Max campaign are as follows. Click the links in each section for more information.

Performance Max concepts

One of the most common goals among advertisers is to encourage customers to pursue a specific action to achieve a goals such as generating sales or leads. In the Google Ads API, Performance Max campaigns for online sales or lead generation are often referred to as standard Performance Max campaigns.

When creating a Performance Max campaign, you can use a bulk mutate request to create the resources required to form a valid, serving campaign in a single request. Not all resources must be created in a single bulk mutate request. The following resources are required to create a valid, serving Performance Max campaign. Learn more in the Structure requests guide.

  • CampaignBudget
  • Campaign
  • AssetGroups
  • AssetGroupAssets

Campaign and campaign budget

Performance Max campaigns have an AdvertisingChannelType of PERFORMANCE_MAX. No AdvertisingChannelSubType should be set.

These are the only supported bidding strategies:

If conversion goals are not explicitly set for the campaign, it defaults to using customer-level conversion goals. However, you can override customer conversion goals to set campaign-specific conversion goals (learn more).

Performance Max campaigns support the following types of criteria:

Assets and asset groups

Performance Max campaigns have some unique characteristics regarding assets.

  1. There are a minimum required number of advertiser-provided assets of different types.
  2. Assets are grouped together in a collection called an AssetGroup, which is unique to Performance Max campaigns.
  3. Some assets are generated automatically by Google using machine learning.

An asset group is a collection of assets centered on a theme or related to a target audience. The asset group is used to assemble all of your ads and build an inventory for all applicable ad formats for your advertising objective. Learn more about asset groups.

Asset groups contain one or more final URLs. At least one final URL is required. Use the URL that is most relevant to the conversion path for the given asset group and campaign objectives.

An AssetGroup is linked to an Asset by creating a new AssetGroupAsset and providing the following:

  • Resource name of the AssetGroup
  • Resource name of the Asset
  • AssetFieldType of the Asset in the AssetGroup

An AssetGroupSignal is a signal that you can provide to Google to optimize ad serving at the asset group level. There are two types of hints that you can provide to Google:

  • audience: A reusable collection of focused segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions
  • search_theme: Information about what your customers are searching for and which topics lead to conversions for your business that you can provide to Google AI

Only some ValueTrack parameters are supported for Performance Max campaigns (learn more).

Optimization with recommendations

Performance Max recommendations categories:

Video walk-through