Google’s updates Performance Max to help advertisers drive better insights

Google has announced the addition of new and advanced features to its Performance Max to set up advertisers for success in 2025 and beyond. The expanded capabilities seek to help advertisers with more control, transparency, and actionable insights within performance max so they can achieve better campaign outcomes.

While noting the latest features, Google’s Director of Product Management, Google Ads, Tal Akabas expressed that the new controls and reporting improvements are structured to aid more performance to the last roll-out in 2024.

“In 2025, we’ll continue growing Performance Max in several key areas to help you improve results and gain more transparency into what’s driving performance,” said Tal Akabas, Google’sDirector of Product Management, Google Ads.

The director noted that there will be more improvements in the coming months which will include more insights and control types. 

In 2024, Google launched a suite of Performance Max features centred around improving controls and reporting capabilities. It helps dive deeper into performance with improved insights create visually engaging ads and increase your asset variety among others.

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New Additions

The 2025 launch is featured with the following new additions. 

1. More campaign control to steer AI

This comes as an extension to the beta for campaign-level negative keywords, which allows advertisers to exclude specific queries they don’t want to show ads on for brand suitability.

Google AI will use data presented to predict which new users are likely to maximize lifetime value for advertisers’ business and bid more for them. Reporting is also available at the campaign level so that individuals can see how many new customers their campaign is driving, and how many were high-value new customers.

With this new feature, advertisers can specify their high-value customers and the long-term value they represent through Customer Match. 

2. Enhanced search reporting and guidance

This feature allows advertisers to use search terms insights to see whether queries are coming from Performance Max’s keyword-less targeting or search themes they have added.

There is also an indicator next to the search themes that tells how “useful” the search themes are. These new reporting insights help to understand if the search themes provided are driving incremental traffic, on top of what Performance Max would find on its own, or whether you’d benefit from updating your search themes.

This feature also comes as an extension to the reporting guidance introduced under search themes in beta.

3. Improved assets grouping reporting

This feature, an enhancement to the asset group reporting, comes with the ability to segment Advertisers’ asset group performance in all Performance Max campaigns. 

It helps to break down results more granularly, including seeing conversions by device, time, and more. In comparison to the previous version, asset group performance is now downloadable, and its data can now be shared outside of the Google Ads UI.

More about Google’s Performance Max

Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that allows advertisers to increase conversions across Google’s range of advertising channels. This includes Search, Display, Discover, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube. 

It is designed to complement keyword-based Search campaigns to help advertisers find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels. Performance Max is not an advertising channel like Google Search or YouTube, but a type of targeting strategy that spans across all of Google’s advertising channels.

In addition, Performance Max helps advertisers drive performance based on their specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. 

Performance Max uses Google AI across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. They’re all empowered by individuals’ specific advertising objectives, for example, if you have a CPA or ROAS target, and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds you provide.