Performance Max
Performance Max works when it's fed strong creative, clean conversion data and proper audience signals. We provide all three.
Performance Max is Google's most powerful and most misunderstood campaign type. Hand it sloppy assets, broken conversion tracking and no audience signals, and it'll spend months building Display impressions for irrelevant audiences while reporting "good results" on view-through conversions. Configure it properly — strong creative in every format, seeded audience signals from your customer list, enhanced conversions with clean data, brand exclusions to stop it cannibalising organic branded clicks — and it becomes a genuinely effective channel for expanding reach beyond Search. We've managed PMax campaigns alongside Search for 60+ accounts. We treat PMax like an account, not a set-and-forget magic button. A senior buyer reviews placements, assets and conversion data every week. We'll tell you honestly whether PMax is the right next step for your account or whether you should be doubling down on Search Ads first.
What's Included in Performance Max
- Asset group strategy — multiple asset groups segmented by product/service/audience with distinct creative angles
- Creative direction and copy — headlines, descriptions, images and video scripts written for each asset group's audience signal
- Audience signal seeding — customer lists, website visitors, in-market audiences and custom intent audiences seeded as signals (not targeting)
- Enhanced conversions and offline conversion imports — so PMax's bidding has clean, complete signal from actual booked jobs, not just form fills
- Weekly placement review — irrelevant Display placements and search query insights reviewed and acted on
- Brand exclusion lists — so PMax doesn't poach clicks from your branded Search campaigns or organic brand traffic
- Monthly results call — revenue and leads attributed to PMax vs. other campaign types, asset group performance analysis
Why DSIGNS for Performance Max?
- 01PMax-experienced senior buyers — we've run PMax since its release and know the edge cases: how to diagnose when it's spending on irrelevant placements, how to use asset group segmentation to control where budget goes, and when to pull spend back to Search
- 02We treat PMax like an account, not a magic button — weekly review of placement reports, asset performance and search term insights from the new PMax search query reports
- 03Strong creative and clean data feeds — PMax is only as good as what you feed it. We produce the creative and configure the conversion tracking before the campaign launches
- 04Real team weekly in the account — a real person is reviewing your PMax account every week, not an automated alert when something reaches a threshold
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Still got questions? .
Should I run only PMax and shut down Search campaigns? +
Almost never. PMax and Search serve different roles. Search captures high-intent queries where control over keywords, negatives and ad copy matters. PMax fills the gaps across Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and search queries outside your Search campaign's keyword set. The best-performing accounts run both, with brand exclusions on PMax so it doesn't compete with your branded Search terms.
How do I know if PMax is working or just claiming credit for organic conversions? +
This is the right question. We configure proper conversion tracking with Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) and cross-campaign attribution so you can see whether PMax is driving incremental conversions or just touching the last click on journeys that would have converted anyway. We also run periodic Search Ads isolation tests to measure PMax's true incremental contribution.
What creative do I need to run PMax properly? +
At minimum: 15 headlines, 4 descriptions, 3-5 images in multiple aspect ratios (1:1, 4:1, 1.91:1), and a YouTube video asset (15s minimum, 30s preferred). We brief and produce all of this as part of the PMax campaign setup. If you don't have a video, we scope a basic motion graphic or script for an existing shoot.
Our performance max process — no fluff, no surprises.
Same four stages on every performance max project. You'll always know what's happening this week and what's next.
Discovery call
30-minute chat to understand your business, your customers and what success looks like for your performance max.
Strategy & scope
We map the work to outcomes — fixed-price scope, clear deliverables, no surprise rounds on your performance max project.
Design & build
Senior in-house team executes — you'll see real progress weekly, not a 6-week silence followed by a big reveal.
Launch & support
We hand over editable files, train your team, and stay on for 30 days post-launch to fix anything that needs fixing.