Get started with Performance Max

This guide provides a checklist of concepts and tasks for each of the three Performance Max campaign types to help you build your campaign. To get started, select a campaign type:

Standard Performance Max campaigns

The steps to create a standard Performance Max campaign are summarized below. Follow the links in each section for more information.

Performance Max concepts

Performance Max is a campaign type that provides a unified buying service to all Google Ads inventory.

When creating a Performance Max campaign, use a bulk mutate request to create different types of entities in a single request. Not all resources must be created in a single bulk mutate request. At a minimum, the following resources should be created as part of a single bulk mutate request to create a valid, serving Performance Max campaign.

  • CampaignBudget
  • Campaign
  • AssetGroups
  • AssetGroupAssets
  • AssetGroupSignals (if provided)

Campaign and campaign budget

  • The budget must have a DAILY budget period.
  • The budget cannot be shared.

Performance Max campaigns have an AdvertisingChannelType of PERFORMANCE_MAX. No AdvertisingChannelSubType should be set.

These are the only supported bidding strategies:

If conversion goals are not explicitly set for the campaign, it defaults to using customer-level conversion goals. However, you can override customer conversion goals to set campaign-specific conversion goals.

Performance Max campaigns support the following types of criteria:

Assets and asset groups

Performance Max campaigns have some unique characteristics regarding assets.

  1. There are a minimum required number of advertiser-provided assets of different types.
  2. Assets are grouped together in a collection called an AssetGroup, which is unique to Performance Max campaigns.
  3. Some Assets are generated automatically by Google using machine learning.

An asset group is a collection of assets centered on a theme or related to a target audience. The asset group is used to assemble all of your ads and build an inventory for all applicable ad formats for your advertising objective. Learn more about asset groups.

Asset groups contain one or more final URLs. At least one final URL is required. Use the URL that is most relevant to the conversion path for the given asset group and campaign objectives.

An AssetGroup is linked to an Asset by creating a new AssetGroupAsset and providing the following:

  • Resource name of the AssetGroup
  • Resource name of the Asset
  • AssetFieldType of the Asset in the AssetGroup

An Audience is a reusable collection of focused segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions. An AssetGroupSignal lets you specify which Audience is most likely to convert for your AssetGroup.

Only some ValueTrack parameters are supported for Performance Max campaigns.