NEW Performance Max Updates for 2025

Hey, check it out. So Google just released some new performance Max features. I'm going to give you a breakdown of each one of those and then my thoughts on them. Some of them are good and I'm happy to see these changes. Others kind of useless in my opinion. So I have the link to the official Google Doc on these changes here. This is a bit wordy, so I created a nice little format here for this video to go through. So let's go change. Number one, Google is now allowing negative keywords at the campaign level for pmax, which is great. Used to be you'd have to add it at the account level, which then would interfere with all your other campaigns. Or you got to contact a Google rep or fill out a form. However, big greedy Google limits this to 100 negative keywords per campaign. I don't know why they would limit it. You know, search campaigns, shopping campaigns, you can add a massive amount of negative keywords here. They're like, yeah, here's a little bone for you advertisers. We'll allow you to add 100, but we don't want you adding more than that. I think that's stupid. So my thoughts on this. I still recommend actually using the modification form, which you can. If you just type in Performance Max campaign modification request form in Google, you'll be able to find this, contact them and add the negatives you need to add or want to add this hundred negative keyword campaign. Thing is, I don't. It's like, thanks Google. But also at the same time like why? Why are you capping a hundred? It just seems crazy to me. Okay, number two, they've got a high value customer acquisition mode which sounds very fancy. It's so fancy. So what this does is it uses your customer match data to identify potentially high value customers and AI will predict which new users might maximize lifetime value and it will adjust your bidding strategy accordingly. Okay, my thoughts, I'm not too excited about this feature. I actually see this as a way of usually seeing cpcs get jacked up. And in my opinion, Google does a terrible job knowing new verse returning. So this is not a feature you'll probably find me using. Not saying I won't test. I am agnostic to tactics. You'll find a lot of people, they get in these camps like, you must be doing this with your Google Ads account. I know more than you and obviously I make videos on recommendations. But even though I'm saying this is probably going to just end up jacking up CPCs. And I think Google does A terrible job of knowing new verse returning. I probably will still test it and see what happens. And if it works and I'll test more and if that continues to work, then I'll sing its praises. But from what I have seen from Google and this type of like increasing value of customers, I've always found it, they do a terrible job A and then B, I just see CPC increases there. So I'm very skeptical of that one. Number three, Brand exclusions from product feed campaigns. It's kind of an interesting one. So basically you can select a brand term to exclude from your PMAX campaign, running a product feed that then can exclude the brand term from search but keep it active on shopping ads. This was actually something that I've seen a lot of companies do. I I talk about this in my performance max course that I have, but people would create performance max campaigns, run their shopping feed in there and then exclude their brand terms, but then not set up a standard shopping campaign to capture those brand terms. So it's like, oh dude, you like you just killed all of the brand traffic for your shopping ads. So now when I would type some of those people's brands in competitor shopping ads would just dominate. They wouldn't show up anywhere because they excluded it. So this I think is a feature to help advertisers prevent that. I think it's interesting, but I'm actually, if I'm excluding brand terms from pmax, I actually want to usually control that. So I have brand then built out in standard search. I have brand built out in standard shopping as well. So this is a feature I don't see myself using, but I can see why they created it. I just don't see in most of our strategies that we're running, I, I don't see myself just trying to exclude brand from search while keeping it active on shopping ads and performance max at that, at that point I'm going to want no brand in my PMAX and run brand separately where I have more control over it. And I don't want in those cases usually PMAX trying to get too much of my too much brand metric traffic to it. So performance max is going to yield to the lowest hanging fruit. Brand traffic is the lowest hanging fruit you can get and so usually it starts yielding to that. So if I'm excluding brand, I'm just getting rid of it completely from pmax. So I don't see myself utilizing this then. Number four URL contains rules enhancement. So you can expand performance max campaigns with product feeds and enables targeting based on URL categories. Example, target all pages containing shoes in URL for an athletic apparel store. They've got maybe a better explanation than I do there if you go to the actual thing. So you can use URLs to target traffic based on specific pages. Basically this is just a way of like controlling what pages Google is crawling in PMAX for some of the contextual data or crawl for, you know, the DSA search terms it may show for, et cetera inside of pmax. I don't know, I don't, I probably won't use this. I tend to use URL exclusions more. But this is an option that I could see being used in specific cases where you really trust trying to target like let's say in this case, hey, hey, this PMAX campaign should really only be hitting on shoe pages. I don't want Google expanding beyond that within the URL expansion targeting. So I could see it being useful. I don't know, I'll have to test this more as it comes out. But again, for, for now I use a lot of URL exclusions at the PMAX saying like, hey, don't crawl these pages because I don't want you showing any search terms or any ads for search terms that would be based on off of the these pages. A lot of times that's like blog pages and articles. Sometimes Google will scoop that up if you have the URL expansion on your performance max campaign. And then now you're getting like top of funnel sort of search traffic, which is not normally what I'm trying to target within my performance max campaigns if it's obviously going after new customer acquisition. Okay then five, this is actually probably my favorite change out of all demographic and device controls. You will now be able to exclude age groups like you can at shopping and search and, and you can do device level exclusions. So I'm very happy about this. I think Google, even though, you know, they claim, hey, we'll know who your converters are once we get enough conversion data and we're going to do a really good job of only honing in on those people who have intent and look like your converters. Then you look at accounts and it's like, yeah, but it's still blowing a lot of money on, you know, tablet traffic in a lot of cases. And I'm not saying tablets are bad, it's just a lot of cases tablets don't perform well. And then if you have an underperforming campaign, I'm always like, just exclude tablets out of the gate. Get that Campaign dialed in under mobile and desktop and then open up tablet traffic. But usually like something like that. I tend to look at age group. You know, there are companies I'm reviewing and just like guys 18 to 24 year olds just don't make sense for you. You're, you're targeting an older demographic. And Google does a terrible job still showing somehow ads to 18 to 24 year olds. Now Google's not perfect. It could be incorrectly lumping people into demographic age groups that they're not actually in. So that's something to consider. But you know, always review the data, optimize off of that data. But I do like this, I could see this being beneficial. So like if I were to launch a campaign out of the gate for a company that had like a specific age group that we follow for sure know like this is our target and we know we must exclude like an 18 to 24 year old demographic, I, I would go in and, and do that. So I'm pretty happy this gives a little control back on at least demographics and age groups there. And then you're also going to start getting some new reporting. So we get enhanced search reporting, new features. So search insights now will show search categories. So if I you know, full screen this image and it's going to show you source in the insights report inside of your performance max campaign and it shows you kind of what source Google's using to pull these search categories. So Here it says URLs, creative assets and more. I don't know, I don't know what I do with that information. What am I supposed to do with that? So cool, thanks for giving me that. But I just, I don't know what I actually can do with that to make any strategic changes. So I, I guess g, thanks Google. Again a change there I'm like totally unsure about then. Search themes include useful indicators. Okay so and this one will be a little hard to, to pull. I had to pull it from the actual blog post from Google which is there. But they you know, kind of lock that image anyways in your search themes. If you're using search themes, they're going to show you whether or not this search theme is helping to improve your reach. So it's basically saying, so let's say you add you know, a bunch of search themes into an asset group and then you go back in there and look at those signals of those search themes. They're going to now have these performance indicators and saying like hey, this is actually improving the reach of your campaign knowing now okay this is actually useful. Whereas before you threw a bunch of search themes in there and it's just like, okay, you move on. There's really no indicator of whether or not those were good or bad. Now my opinion with search themes are if you're brand new, if you're starting a brand new account or a brand new performance max campaign, I'm fine adding them in. However, what I have found is on an account or a performance max campaign that's been running for a historically long period of time and there's lots of conversion data to it, I just find search themes seem to not do a whole lot. Or what I have found is, let's say I take a performance max campaign that I've been running no search themes on and it's doing well and I've got standard search campaigns running as well. That performance max campaigns, when I add in search themes tends to steal from my standard search campaigns. So when you add search themes then if you have standard search campaigns running, make sure you look at the before and after. So I added search themes on, you know, this day I'm going to look back 14 days from now or 30 days from now, whenever you want and then look at the search campaigns that those search themes would also be search terms in from your search keywords inside of your search campaigns and make sure you don't just basically have a decrease in search campaigns and an increase in performance max. So it's kind of like your conversions got like siphoned over to pmax but ultimately you're at zero net positive from that. I, I have seen that happen. So be cautious of that test that we're actually doing some further search theme testing. Now again, search themes, I'm not like anti search themes. I just do some testing on it. I usually, I do run it on brand new account builds. I do run it usually on brand new performance max campaign builds. But if I am running solid standard search campaigns that are performing really well, I, I know if I add search themes that will cross over and technically Google should only in that scenario it would exact match keywords should override your search themes. But if you're running phrase, if you're running broad et cetera in those search campaigns, pmax still will look looks to me siphon over some of that search traffic. So just make sure you keep an eye on that. Cause like what can happen, you add search seems like oh awesome conversions went up and then you look at search campaigns, it's like actually it looks like pmax just sucked those conversions over to it which pmax is notorious at doing. So it's cool they've got these performance indicators but pro tip there on how you should be looking at search themes so just you know, be cautious there. So those are my thoughts there. And then we've got asset group reporting improvements, more detailed breakdown of asset group performance by device level, time based analysis and enhanced conversion tracking. My my only thoughts there are like and again this is going to be down here if you want to read further in the article. Cool. It's given us some more granular data at the asset group level. I haven't really seen it yet in a live account so but it's neat to be able to pull some more granular data in the black box that Performance Max is okay, there you go. There's my thoughts on the new Performance Max updates. Again these updates came out in January of 23rd 2025 so depending on what day you're watching this video, just know this is when these actually started kicking in. Listen, if you are interested in learning more about Google Ads, obviously lots of content on the YouTube channel, I also have a group called PPC Copilot. I've got my sort of course material in there. I have a lead generation course, E commerce accelerator course. We've got Q&As resources, Google Ads, CRO stuff, a lot of great content there. I do a weekly Q and A and a video feedback review and what that is is basically if you don't want to ask a question and you actually want me to like see the data then I'm just send me a loom video in the group and I keep it private. That way your information is confidential and then I actually will review that video and I'll review the data of your account and your question and then usually I respond back with a video format as well. So I'm doing that weekly with people, Weekly Q&As with video feedback and we've got a lot of ongoing training that's taking place there. In fact these PMAX updates, you know I updated the group on this I think a week ago. So usually I'm trying to update first in the group before I would build like any sort of YouTube content around that. So listen, if you're trying to upgrade your Google Ads knowledge or upgrade your Google Ads account, would love to have you in the group. There's going to be a link in the description below if you want to go check that out. If not, no worries, I'll see you on the next video.