Performance Max
Google's goal-based campaign type that serves across every Google surface from one feed-driven campaign.
Performance Max, or PMax, is Google's goal-based campaign type that serves across every Google surface (Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps) from a single campaign, driven by your product feed, asset groups and audience signals. You set a goal and a target, and Google's automation decides where and to whom to show.
Handled well it scales ecommerce revenue; left on defaults it harvests cheap brand traffic and reports demand you already owned as if it were new. The feed is the campaign, brand exclusions keep the numbers honest, and it has to be judged in quarters, not weeks. The mistake we see most is reading its headline ROAS without excluding brand, so the campaign serves on cheap branded queries and books demand you already owned as if it were new.
Read Performance Max for ecommerce for what actually works, see the Performance Max ramp playbook, and the catalog side in Google Shopping management.
Put the number to work: the break-even ROAS calculator turns your margins into the ROAS you need, and a free Due Diligence Audit checks whether the figures you see are the ones you are getting. Back to the glossary.