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When you open a Google Ads account, Performance Max is often the first thing suggested. It isn't necessarily the first one to launch.

What is a Search campaign?

A Search campaign shows your ads in the results, based on what your customers type. You pick the searches, see which ones cost money and cut the ones that don't pay. It's the easiest to read.

What is Performance Max?

Performance Max is a single campaign running everywhere on Google: search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps and partner sites. You provide your images, your text and your goal, and Google spreads the budget.

A powerful campaign needssomeone watching it

What is Performance Max's trap?

Performance Max chases what you ask it to. If your tracking is off, say it treats a visit as a sale, it optimizes the wrong thing, very fast, with your money.

Two businesses, two choices

You judge a campaign by the cost of an inquiry or a sale, never by its name. Take two imaginary businesses.

The roofer sells a service in a set area. What will bring his cost down is tuning the account, search by search. The shop has a catalog: Google Shopping shows its products, with prices, right at the moment of the search.

How to watch a Performance Max campaign

If nobody does these checks, a simple Search campaign is better than a powerful one left alone.

Which one should you start with?

For a contractor or a local service, we almost always start with Search: it's simple, measurable, and you learn which searches pay. For a store with a catalog, Shopping and Performance Max earn their place once sales are tracked properly.

What Search asks of you

A Search campaign is built around searches. We group the words that go together, write an ad that answers them, and each group leads to the right page. A plumber separates "water leak" from "water heater," because they're not the same customers or the same pages.

Then the work happens every week. We read the searches that triggered your ads and exclude the ones that have nothing to do with you. "Plumber training" or "plumber salary" cost a click and bring nobody. This sorting is what lowers the cost of an inquiry.

What Performance Max asks of you

Performance Max needs material. It wants copy, images, ideally videos, and for a store, a clean catalog. Give it little and it shows little, everywhere. A campaign made with three poor images doesn't get good results just because it's automated.

Above all, it needs a reliable goal and enough results to learn from. On an account receiving a few inquiries a month, it has nothing to compare. The account fumbles, and your money pays for the fumbling.

Google's other campaigns

For a small account, these campaigns come later. They have their uses, but you first need to know which searches pay.

Can you run both?

Yes, on an account that has enough to feed them. Search holds the searches you want to keep, and Performance Max goes after the rest. Google gives Search priority when the search matches one of your keywords word for word. For the others, they can step on each other: Performance Max can pick up searches on your own name, for instance, and count them as a success. You can prevent this by excluding your brand from the campaign.

That's why we add them one after the other, never the same day. That way you know what each one brings, and the number in your report still means something.

Questions to ask your provider

If someone offers you Performance Max, ask three questions. What counts as a result? How many results does the account get per month? Who will look at the searches every week? If the answer to the last one is "Google handles it," you know what to expect.

Already have an account running on its own? Read how to take over a Google Ads account.