Performance Max (PMax) is a Google Ads campaign type that buys ads across all of Google’s channels from one budget and towards one goal: Search including Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You supply the goal, the budget, the products and the creative. The algorithm decides where the ad shows, to whom and at what price.
Performance Max (PMax) is a goal-based Google Ads campaign. It takes one budget and one number to hit and spreads them across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps on its own. For an online store, it pulls products from your product feed through Merchant Center.
For retailers it replaced Smart Shopping campaigns, and today it is the most common campaign type in the accounts we take over. For years it was called a black box. During 2025 Google added channel-level performance reporting, full search terms reporting, negative keywords, age exclusions and device targeting. Spring 2026 brought exclusions for your own customer lists, a budget report that projects month-end spend, age and gender breakdowns in audience reporting, and placements segmented by network.
The algorithm gets a single goal and looks for auctions where it expects to meet it. For stores that is usually maximize conversion value with a target ROAS; for services, maximize conversions with a target CPA. The goal and the budget apply to the whole campaign, not to individual products.
| Campaign | budget + goal | One target ROAS or CPA for everything inside it. |
| Asset group | copy, images, video, signals | Creative and product selection. Shares budget and goal with the campaign. |
| Target ROAS | 100 ÷ (margin − profit) × 100 | Example: 35% margin, 10% of revenue kept as profit → target ROAS 400% |
The algorithm can’t tell whether 1,000 in revenue came from an item with a 45% margin or one with 15%. It spends where it has the most data and where selling is easiest. That is why the campaign goal should be derived from your gross margin, not from what looks good in a report.
Work out the target ROAS to give the campaign so that the profit you want is still there after paying for ads. Next to it you’ll see your break-even ROAS and the highest ACoS you can afford.
PMax needs three things: tracking that counts real purchases with a value, a product feed in good shape, and enough conversions to learn from. Google doesn’t publish a hard minimum. Our rule: we don’t split a campaign below 30 conversions in 30 days, and every split-off campaign should reach at least 30 purchases in 30 days on its own.
A small account with similar margins across the range does better with one PMax plus search and brand campaigns. An account where categories differ in margin by more than 10 percentage points, or have their own season, earns more with several PMax campaigns, each with its own target. Here is how it played out in four accounts we manage:
| Account | Starting point | What we did | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elektro Sláma | One PMax carrying 74% of the budget | Three category PMax campaigns, each with its own target ROAS | Summer 2026 vs 2025: conversion value +80% on spend +28%, ACoS 30.7% → 21.9% |
| Vše pro pejska | 81–96% of the budget in one PMax | Separate PMax for clothing, dog beds, hoodies and more | Year over year: ad revenue +31% on spend −1%, ACoS 22.7% → 17.2% |
| MyDeko | Six campaigns, Google Ads ROAS 0.52 | One PMax, search and brand | Apr–Sep vs Nov–Mar: cost per purchase −72%, ROAS 2.31 |
| Letsport | 27 campaigns, ACoS 62.5% | 4 campaigns, a new PMax for climbing | Inherited PMax at 77% of spend and 41.4% ACoS; the climbing PMax still at 56.2% |
In three accounts we split PMax; at MyDeko we consolidated instead, because a small volume of purchases needed its data in one campaign. Figures come from Google Ads; the periods and the month-by-month steps are in the case studies.
PMax doesn’t replace everything. Next to it, accounts run campaigns that give more control over a single surface.
| Campaign | Where it shows | What you control | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance Max | All six Google channels | Goal, budget, assets, product selection, exclusions | Stores with a feed and purchase tracking |
| Search | Search results | Keywords, copy, bids | Brand, specific queries, services |
| Standard Shopping | Shopping results | Products, bids, campaign priority | When you need manual control over Shopping |
| Demand Gen | YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Display | Audiences, creative | Creating demand with images and video |
Terms you can’t talk about PMax without.
A single target ROAS is comfortable for a high-margin category and loss-making for a low-margin one. At Elektro Sláma one PMax carried 74% of the budget and nobody could say what in it was profitable. Category campaigns with their own targets took ACoS from 30.7% to 21.9%.
The algorithm optimizes for whatever you mark as a conversion. At Letsport the campaigns were learning from zero-value contact actions until August 2026. Only after the contact action moved to secondary conversions did they learn from purchases alone. Our rule: the primary conversion is a real purchase with a value, nothing else.
Without a brand exclusion, PMax happily claims orders from people who searched for you by name. The campaign ROAS looks great and tells you nothing about acquiring new customers. Leave the brand to a separate search campaign and exclude it in PMax.
Performance Max (PMax) is a Google Ads campaign type that buys ads on Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps from one budget and towards one goal. You supply the goal, the budget, the products and the creative; the algorithm decides on placements and bids.
A Standard Shopping campaign shows products only in Shopping results and gives you manual control over bids and priorities. PMax uses the same products from Merchant Center but shows them across all Google channels and sets budget allocation and bids itself, based on the goal.
Google doesn’t set a hard minimum. In our experience a campaign with fewer than 30 conversions in 30 days learns slowly and expensively, so we don’t split below that line, and we want every split-off campaign to reach at least 30 purchases in 30 days.
Yes, much more than before. Since 2025 PMax has channel-level reporting and full search terms reporting, and since spring 2026 the placement report can be segmented by network. Product-level performance is in the products report.
For an online store, yes. Products only reach PMax through Merchant Center, which receives them from the product feed. Without a feed PMax can still run, for example for lead generation, but it then promotes copy, images and video, not products with prices.
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