Performance Max in 2026: What Has Changed and What Still Matters

Performance Max launched as a black box and spent two years earning a reputation for opacity. Advertisers could not see where their ads ran. They could not see what searches triggered their campaigns. Asset group performance data was minimal. The complaints were valid.

Google has been chipping away at those gaps. The 2025 and early 2026 updates changed Performance Max meaningfully, though not completely. Here is what is actually different now, what we adjusted in our campaigns as a result, and what has not changed despite the updates.

The Search Terms Reporting Improvements

The biggest change for most advertisers is search terms transparency. Throughout 2024 and into 2025, Google progressively expanded the search terms data available in PMax campaigns. By late 2025, PMax was showing search category data, individual search terms that drove conversions, and campaign-level breakdowns that were simply not available at launch.

This matters because search terms are the primary lever for negative keyword management. Before the reporting improvements, PMax campaigns were running on searches that advertisers could not see and therefore could not exclude. Wasted spend on irrelevant queries was common and invisible.

Now, with better search terms data, the workflow looks more like a standard search campaign. Review the search categories and search terms weekly. Add irrelevant terms to the account-level negative keyword list, which applies to PMax, or request campaign-level negatives through Google support (the interface for campaign-level PMax negatives has improved but is still not self-serve in all accounts).

The limitation that remains: search terms data in PMax still does not approach the granularity of standard Search campaigns. You see what converted. You do not see every term that spent without converting. Full transparency is not there yet.

Asset Group Management Changes

Asset groups are the structural unit of Performance Max, equivalent to ad groups in Search campaigns. The 2025 updates gave advertisers meaningful improvements in how asset groups are managed and how performance data is surfaced.

Performance breakdown by asset group is now more granular. You can see which asset groups are performing at or below expectations, and more importantly, which individual assets within a group are rated Low, Good, or Best by Google's assessment. Assets rated Low consistently represent waste: impressions and spend going to combinations that do not resonate. Pull those out.

The asset testing framework improved. PMax now supports A/B testing across asset groups in a more structured way than the early setup allowed. You can test different creative approaches across groups and get clearer performance differentiation rather than relying entirely on Google's optimisation.

What we changed after the updates: we reduced the number of assets per group in most campaigns. Early PMax advice was to feed the algorithm as many assets as possible and let it find combinations. In practice, more assets meant weaker individual assets getting served alongside strong ones. Tighter asset groups with 4 to 5 high-quality images, 2 to 3 video options, and headline combinations that consistently hit the theme produce cleaner results than 20-asset groups with significant quality variation.

Placement Controls and Brand Safety

The 2025 updates added more meaningful placement exclusions. For a long time, PMax advertisers had limited ability to exclude specific placements in Display and YouTube inventory. The expanded exclusion options now allow more precise control over where Display ads serve, which is significant for brands with specific brand safety requirements.

Brand exclusions, the ability to prevent PMax from showing on searches for competitor brand terms, became more accessible. This was a common complaint from advertisers who found their PMax spend going to competitor brand searches that their standard campaigns had excluded. Brand exclusions for PMax are now manageable through the campaign interface rather than requiring a support request.

We implemented brand exclusions for all PMax campaigns that run alongside Search campaigns. Without this, PMax can cannibalise branded Search traffic at lower efficiency because PMax does not differentiate between brand and non-brand intent in its bidding.

What We Adjusted in Our Campaigns

The search terms transparency prompted the most significant change in how we manage PMax. We now run a weekly search terms review for PMax campaigns, matching the cadence we use for Search campaigns. Any search category showing spend with low conversion rate relative to the campaign average goes on the review list.

Signal strength became a priority after observing performance differences between PMax campaigns with weak and strong audience signals. Audience signals are not targeting: they are directional hints to the algorithm. Campaigns seeded with high-quality first-party data, customer lists, and specific retargeting audiences consistently outperform campaigns seeded with broad interest categories. This did not change in the 2025 updates but the reporting improvements made the performance difference easier to verify.

We also changed our campaign structure approach. Early PMax setups often had one campaign covering all products or services. The performance data visibility improvements made it clear that asset groups targeting very different audiences and conversion types were pulling the optimisation in different directions. Separate PMax campaigns for meaningfully different business goals produce cleaner data and better results.

What Has NOT Changed

The core requirement that has not changed and will not change regardless of interface improvements: Performance Max needs strong conversion data to function properly.

PMax is a conversion-optimisation tool. It learns what a conversion looks like from your account's conversion history and uses that to find similar opportunities across all Google channels. Without conversion data, the algorithm has nothing to learn from. It will distribute spend across channels and formats in ways that are not optimised for your actual business goal.

The minimum we work to before launching PMax is 30 to 50 monthly conversions in the account, preferably from a Search campaign running on the same goal. That history gives PMax a starting point. New accounts launching PMax from zero conversion data consistently underperform and often produce nonsensical results.

Budget thresholds also have not changed. PMax campaigns with very small daily budgets, under $30 per day in most Australian market contexts, lack the spend to generate meaningful learning. The algorithm needs impression and click volume across multiple channels to optimise. Underfunded PMax campaigns often fail not because of strategy but because there is not enough spend to produce the signal the algorithm requires.

The Honest Assessment in 2026

Performance Max is a better product than it was at launch. The reporting improvements are real. Asset group management is more controllable. Search terms visibility has improved. These changes mean PMax is now a viable option for a wider range of advertisers than it was two years ago.

It is still not a tool for every account. Accounts with strong conversion volume, quality creative assets, meaningful first-party audience data, and sufficient budget get genuine value from PMax. Accounts without those foundations are better served by a well-structured Search campaign with manual control.

The common mistake is treating PMax as a simpler alternative to Search, where you add assets and let Google handle everything. That works until the first major issue: irrelevant search terms consuming budget, a low-quality asset getting served at scale, or audience signals so broad they provide no directional value. The oversight work is different from Search, but it is not less.

For a full picture of how we structure Google Ads campaigns, including when to use PMax and when to use Search, see our Google Ads services.