Performance Max Guide for Australian Brands

Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that spends one budget across Search (including Shopping ads), YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, with Google's AI deciding where each dollar goes. It pays off when conversion values reflect margin and brand searches are kept out. Google's retail guidance is to run it for at least six weeks before judging it.

We run Performance Max for clients of our Google Ads agency, mostly online retailers and lead generation businesses. This guide covers what it does, when it is worth it, how to set up feeds and asset groups, how to keep it off your brand, and how to judge it on margin. Google features were checked against Google's help pages on 1 October 2026.

What does Performance Max do?

You supply the goals, a budget, creative assets and, if you sell products, a Merchant Center feed. You can add audience signals and search themes as hints. Google's AI then picks placements, combines your assets into ads and sets a bid for every auction across its channels.

Audience signals are suggestions, not targeting. Google says it may show your ads outside them if it predicts that will help reach your goal. Assets sit in asset groups, and for retailers each asset group also holds listing groups, which decide which products from the feed it can advertise.

What are the benefits of Performance Max?

Two matter most. It reaches every Google channel from one campaign, so you don't need separate Display, YouTube and Shopping campaigns to be present there. And it bids on your conversion values in every auction across all of them. The price is control: you steer with inputs, exclusions and targets rather than choosing placements and keywords yourself.

Is Performance Max worth it?

It is worth it when Google can see what a sale is worth and you can separate new demand from demand you already had. It isn't worth it when the conversion it chases is a form fill nobody qualifies, when the account has few conversions, or when most of its revenue turns out to be people already searching for your brand.

Source: Profit Geeks practice, built on Google Ads Help guidance on Performance Max, brand exclusions and Performance Max experiments, checked 1 October 2026.

Budget is the other half of the question. If you are still working out what you can spend, our guide to Google Ads costs in Australia sets out what clicks cost and how to size a budget.

How long does it take for Performance Max to work?

Allow one to two weeks for the bidding to settle, and at least six weeks before you compare results. Those are Google's own figures, and the clock restarts whenever you make a big change.

Source: Google Ads Help (Performance Max not running or low traffic, Optimisation tips for Performance Max with a Merchant Center feed, Changing conversion goals used for Smart Bidding, Best practices for asset groups, About Smart Bidding), checked 1 October 2026.

Conversion lag matters too. Google advises leaving the most recent conversion delay out of any ROAS evaluation. If customers usually take ten days to buy, the last ten days of a report are incomplete, so judge the period before them.

Planning for Black Friday, Christmas and EOFY sales

Sale periods need a different tool depending on their length. Google's seasonality adjustments are for short events, under seven days, where you expect conversion rates to jump by more than about 30 percent, such as a Black Friday weekend. For a sale that runs for weeks, such as an end of financial year sale, Google suggests adjusting your ROAS or CPA targets instead. Either way, load sale asset groups at least two weeks early, which is Google's advice for getting holiday assets approved in time.

How to structure feeds, asset groups and campaigns

Google's advice is to consolidate. Fewer, larger campaigns learn faster, and you should only split campaigns when they need different budgets, targets or settings. Inside a campaign, split asset groups by theme, such as a product range, so the creative matches what is being sold.

Retailers should fix three things in the feed before touching bids:

• Disapprovals and missing attributes. A product that isn't approved can't serve, however good the campaign.
• Prices. For Australia, Merchant Center expects prices to include GST, and they must match the landing page and checkout.
• Custom labels. Merchant Center gives you five, custom_label_0 to custom_label_4, and Google's own example uses one for margin bands. Labels let you put high and low margin products into separate campaigns with different targets.

Each asset group can hold up to 1,000 listing groups, but Google says a very large number isn't best practice and performance may suffer, so it recommends grouping products with custom labels instead. Give every asset group a video, too. If you supply none, Google may generate videos from your images and product data, and those may not be the ones you would choose.

Running an online store? Our Google Shopping agency page explains how we manage the feed, Shopping and Performance Max together.

Brand exclusions: keep Performance Max off your brand searches

When people already searching for your name are counted as Performance Max sales, its results look better than they are. You have three controls, and Google says brand exclusions are usually the better option for brand traffic because they also catch misspellings and other scripts.

Source: Google Ads Help (Answering your top questions about Performance Max, Negative keywords in Performance Max campaigns), checked 1 October 2026.

Our default for brands with real search demand is to run brand terms in their own Search campaign on exact match, exclude the brand from Performance Max's text ads, and judge Performance Max on what remains. A Search keyword identical to the search term takes priority over Performance Max, though Google notes that a budget-limited Search campaign can lose some of those auctions to it, so keep the brand campaign funded.

What can you see inside Performance Max?

Much more than at launch. Four reports do most of the work:

• Search terms. In the search terms report, choose Search terms and landing pages for Performance Max to see queries, landing pages and ad formats, with data back to March 2023. Add irrelevant terms as negatives.
• Channel performance. Results by channel (Search, Maps, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and the Display Network), split out for ads using product data and video.
• Asset groups and assets. Which themes and creative drive conversions.
• Auction insights. For the Search and Shopping ads Performance Max serves.

One caution from Google itself: Performance Max optimises for marginal return across channels, so a channel with a weak average can still be the best place for the next dollar. Judge the campaign on its total contribution, not channel by channel.

Judge Performance Max on margin, not platform ROAS

Platform ROAS is conversion value divided by ad spend. Whether that is profitable depends on your margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your contribution margin, and our ROAS calculator works it out for you.

Take a worked example. A product sells for $110 including GST, which is $100 excluding GST. Stock costs $40, packing and freight $12 and payment fees $2, leaving $46 of contribution before advertising, a 46 percent margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by 0.46, about 2.17, or 217 percent in Google's terms.

Now the Australian catch. If your tag reports the $110 order including GST, every ROAS figure Google shows is 10 percent higher than the GST-exclusive equivalent. Your break-even on Google's numbers becomes 2.17 times 1.1, about 2.39. A campaign reporting 2.3 looks profitable against 2.17 and is losing money.

There are three ways to make Performance Max bid on margin rather than revenue:

• Split by margin band. Use custom labels to place products in campaigns with different Target ROAS, each set above its own break-even.
• Send margin as the value. Google lets you define the conversion value as sales revenue or profit, so you can send gross profit per order instead of revenue.
• Report gross profit. Send cart data with your conversions and add cost of goods sold to the feed, and Google Ads reports gross profit alongside revenue. Google accepts estimates if exact costs aren't available.

For growth from new customers, the new customer acquisition goal bids more for people who haven't bought from you before. Google recommends its New Customer Value mode for online sales, which favours new customers while still reaching repeat buyers. New Customer Only mode bids only for new customers and suits a dedicated acquisition budget.

Targets matter more since 17 August 2026. Google changed its bidding so that budget-limited campaigns with a ROAS or CPA target deliver closer to the target you set, rather than beating it. If your Target ROAS sits below your real break-even, a campaign that used to beat it will now drift down towards it. Our guide to Google Ads bidding strategies shows how to set the number from your margin.

Performance Max for lead generation

Lead generation is where Performance Max most often goes wrong, because a form fill is easy to win and hard to qualify. Google's own advice for lead quality lines up with ours:

• Import outcomes. Use enhanced conversions for leads to bring qualified and converted leads in from your CRM, and make one of those stages the campaign's goal.
• Bid on value. Give lead stages different values and use Maximise conversion value or Target ROAS.
• Share first-party data. Customer Match lists make useful audience signals.
• Add friction for bots. Google suggests reCAPTCHA, double opt-in and server-side validation on forms.

Our Google Ads conversion tracking guide covers the import itself, step by step.

How to measure what Performance Max adds

Reported ROAS shows what Performance Max claimed, not what it caused. To find out what it added:

• Run a Google experiment. Performance Max experiments include uplift tests, which measure the extra conversions it adds alongside your other campaigns, and Standard Shopping against Performance Max tests on the same products.
• Watch branded search. If brand impressions or brand Search conversions fall as Performance Max grows, it may be taking credit for demand you already had.
• Check the blended number. Total revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel (MER) can't be inflated by one platform claiming another's sale; our MER calculator tracks it.

For holdouts and geo tests beyond Google's own tools, see our guide to incrementality testing.

When to switch Performance Max off

After six weeks and enough conversions to judge, pause or rebuild it if any of these hold:

• With brand excluded, its ROAS on your own order data sits below break-even, and adjusting the target hasn't fixed it.
• An uplift experiment shows little or no lift over your other campaigns.
• For lead generation, its imported qualified leads cost more than the same leads from Search.
• The feed or tracking is broken and can't be fixed quickly. Fix those, then relaunch.

If you want Performance Max run against your margin rather than its own reporting, talk to our Google Ads agency team, or work with a named Google Ads consultant. The first step is a free 30-minute profit audit: bring a Performance Max report and the matching orders from your store or CRM.