What's Next For Performance Max?
Google's vision for 2025
Since its launch in late 2021, Performance Max has been positioned as an AI-powered replacement for Smart Shopping that delivers results within advertisers’ performance constraints, serving ads across Google surfaces. The challenge has always been that it provides advertisers with very little insight into how and where it serves ads, lacking both transparency and control.
Over the years, advertisers have had to work with Performance Max’s limitations, such as the lack of placement visibility and the inability to opt out of certain demographic attributes. Many have adapted by running a mix of Performance Max, Search, and Standard Shopping Campaigns (SSC) to retain some control and drive performance. However, across 2024, Google has shifted its approach, rolling out new features and outlining a vision for 2025—one that gives advertisers back slightly more control.
While Performance Max will always be an automated, AI-driven campaign with fewer levers to pull, these changes seem designed to reassure skeptical advertisers and increase adoption. At over three years old now, most sophisticated advertisers will have tested Performance Max - and if they aren’t using it, they have a reason why.
Ecommerce adoption is high due to its Smart Shopping origins, but as mentioned more and more advertisers are layering in Search and Standard Shopping Campaigns to better achieve their goals. Lead generation advertisers, on the other hand, face a different challenge around lead quality. Without an online checkout acting as a gatekeeper, we have found lead quality a recurring challenge.
If advertisers feel they lack the necessary tools to make Performance Max work effectively, meeting them halfway with better controls makes sense—especially considering the vast additional inventory Google can monetize through Performance Max compared to traditional search.
So, what’s coming down the line in 2025?
Self-serve Negative Keywords
Previously, negative keywords could only be added via a Google account manager or through Brand Exclusions. Soon, advertisers will be able to add them directly, allowing for more precision without relying on the broad approach of Brand Exclusions. For example, a large advertiser may want to exclude specific product subsets from campaigns—something now manageable through self-serve negatives.
The biggest drawback is the 100-negative limit per campaign, compared to 10,000 per campaign in Standard Search. On X, we heard this from Ginny Marvin:
While having access to 100 self-serve negatives is certainly an improvement over having none, it’s disappointing that Google hasn’t gone all the way with this.
Brand Exclusions Control
As the name suggests, brand exclusions will now allow us to specify whether they apply to Text and Product Listing Ads (PLAs), or just Text Ads.
This allows advertisers to exclude text ads from appearing on branded queries while still serving PLAs. It is understandable that Google would prefer that advertisers use Performance Max to serve high-impact PLAs rather than relying on a more manual Standard Shopping Campaign setup.
While this doesn’t introduce new functionality, it’s a useful feature to have for advertisers looking to tailor their approach to these two distinct ad formats.
Age & Device Exclusions
For the first time, Performance Max is introducing audience control levers with age and device exclusions.
For advertisers with clear age targeting or device preferences, this could be a game-changer. While Performance Max theoretically learns that, for example, 18-24-year olds aren’t converting, these new exclusions prevent budget being wasted on unnecessary learning.
This functionality has long been available in Search, so it’s great to finally see some parity in Performance Max.
Search Themes
This allows advertisers to add keywords that guide the AI’s targeting, alongside the system-generated keywords based on assets, feeds, and landing pages.
Combined with self-serve campaign negatives, this provides better control over traffic quality. For lead generation advertisers, defining relevant traffic has been a challenge, and this could go some way towards bridging the gap.
For example, a finance advertiser offering loans may struggle if the system fails to distinguish between types of loan queries (such as lower-value home improvement loans or higher-value secured loans). With Search Themes, we can explicitly signal the types of queries we are looking for that demonstrate intent.
As an added benefit, Google will provide insights into how “useful” these inputs are—offering transparency into whether they drive incremental reach.
New Customer Acquisition Goals
For some time, Performance Max has allowed advertisers to optimise toward long-term customer acquisition. However, challenges remain in how this integrates with existing campaigns targeting all customers, the nuances of defining a “new customer” (visit or purchase?), and its impact on conversion volume and campaign spend.
This is being built upon with a focus on higher-value new customers, with the algorithm prioritising high-value new customers. This is worth exploring, but requires tight communication between media and data teams to get the best results.
Increased Transparency - The Missing Piece
Despite these improvements, one omission remains—the ability to fully break down performance by channel (Search, Display, PLAs, etc.) and placement (keyword, website, YouTube channel, etc.)
Since Performance Max’s launch, advertisers have questioned Google’s reluctance to provide this data. Whether intentional or not, the lack of transparency fuels the perception that Google is obfuscating this data for its own benefit, bundling high- and low-value inventory together. While the updates above offer more control, they fail to address this long-standing concern.
As advertisers, we have made some progress in understanding where our ads are showing, but much of this has come in response to negative PR. At the start of 2024, Adalytics covered how brands were being exposed to unsafe inventory through GSP (Google Search Partners). While advertisers could opt in or out of GSP placements in standard Search campaigns, this wasn’t possible in Performance Max. Google has since responded by increasing transparency around GSP placements and allowing advertisers to opt out at the account level.
While this is a step in the right direction, full transparency—seeing exactly what we’re buying and how it’s performing—still feels, unfortunately, like a step too far
While Google hasn’t provided firm release dates, these updates signal a shift towards giving advertisers more control over Performance Max. As these features roll out, testing how they work in practice will be key, and will open up some new avenues for testing and experimentation.