Performance Max management & governance
Performance Max is powerful and opaque, and left ungoverned it quietly takes credit for demand you would have won anyway. We govern it with brand exclusions, search themes, asset coverage and channel-level reporting, as part of our Google Ads management.
£160M+ in ad spend managedPerformance Max spans Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps and Discover from a single campaign, and hands the orchestration to Google's automation. Used well, it finds incremental conversions across surfaces you could not manage by hand. Used without governance, it cannibalises brand search, leans on cheap placements, and reports a flattering blended number while non-brand growth stalls.
What we manage
- Brand exclusions and account-level negatives
- Search themes and audience signals
- Asset group structure and creative coverage
- Search Terms Insights review and negatives
- Placement and content exclusions
- Demographic exclusions where irrelevant
- Single-objective bidding with real values
- Channel-level reporting via scripts and the API
How we keep the upside and remove the failure modes
Stop brand cannibalisation
Brand exclusions and account-level negatives keep Performance Max on incremental demand, with brand search kept in a dedicated, separately measured campaign.
Steer it with inputs
Search themes set the queries to lean into, audience signals seed who to prioritise, and strong asset coverage means more eligible formats.
Force the visibility
Search Terms Insights to find and suppress off-target queries, the placement view to exclude weak inventory, and demographic exclusions where serving is irrelevant.
One objective, clean inputs
A single funnel stage per strategy, fed by accurate, deduplicated conversions and a clean product feed for retail.
Go deeper
- Account-level negative keywords: one list to rule them allThe negative-keyword discipline that also reins in Performance Max.
- Value-based bidding: what it is and why you need itFeeding real values so automation optimises for profit.
- PPC best practice: search termsReading search terms to find waste and intent.
Related services & tools
Common questions
What teams ask about performance max before they hand over an account.
Find out what Performance Max is really doing
Get a free senior review of your Performance Max setup, where it is cannibalising brand, where spend is going, and what to exclude and steer first, from a Google Premier Partner managing £160M+ in ad spend.
- Where budget produced no profitable return in the last 90 days
- Whether your conversion tracking and values are reliable
- How much of your performance is genuinely incremental vs demand you already had
- Which campaigns are worth more budget and which to cut
“A useful PPC review should make the next decision obvious: what to cut, what to protect, and what is worth more investment.”
Fraser Smith, Chief Strategy Officer, reviews every submissionFree senior PPC review
1 of 4 · Account
Are you currently running paid search ads?
This decides what the senior review focuses on.
Pick one to continue. No typing needed yet.
Your information is secure and will not be shared