There’s already plenty of advice out there about how to set up and run Performance Max campaigns. So rather than cover the same ground again, this post focuses on what happens after your campaigns are running: how you can manage and optimize them using Optmyzr.
PMax gives Google a lot of room to make decisions on your behalf. Where your ads appear, how your budget moves, which creative gets served. That’s the trade-off for the automation. What you can control is what signals you give the system, what you exclude, how you monitor performance, and how your budgets are allocated. This post covers each of those.
If you’re specifically looking for ways to protect your campaigns from unwanted changes or performance issues, we cover that separately in our guide to safeguarding Performance Max campaigns.
Related Read: How to Optimize Performance Max in 2026: Expert Answers to the Most Common Questions
Audience signals for Performance Max asset groups
What is an audience signal in Performance Max?
Audience signals are inputs that guide Performance Max’s initial exploration. They don’t determine who your ads reach, and they don’t override your creative, conversion goals, or bid strategy. Think of them as a starting point for the algorithm, not a fence around your audience.
One pattern worth avoiding: duplicating the same assets across multiple asset groups with only the signal changed doesn’t create real segmentation, it creates redundancy. Different audiences need different messaging behind them, not just a different signal attached to the same creative.
Google recommends search term-based custom segments as the strongest signal type, since they’re built on what people are actively looking for rather than who they are.
Add custom segments to asset groups
You can get ideas to identify the best-performing search terms and keywords in your account using Rule Engine and add them to your asset groups as custom segments.
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Or you can use the PMax Asset Groups With no Audience Signal Express optimization to find asset groups missing a signal entirely, and add recommended search terms your ideal customers are likely searching for.
Another way to manage audience signals is to add your data (previously known as remarketing lists - the list of people who have shown interest in your product earlier).
Add your data to asset groups
Customer lists go stale quickly. People who converted last quarter shouldn’t be treated the same as someone who browsed your site yesterday. You can keep your customer list segments fresh by linking them to a spreadsheet, so Optmyzr updates the list automatically rather than requiring a manual upload each time.
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It lets you create a new customer list and update it regularly based on your spreadsheet data.
You can read about the feature in more detail here.
You will find these customer lists available in Google Ads to be linked to asset groups. Link the relevant list to each asset group, and Optmyzr keeps it refreshed from your spreadsheet.
Search themes are a newer, second type of input signal worth adding alongside audience signals. They tell Performance Max about the specific queries your customers are likely to search for, which helps the system discover relevant traffic faster, especially for PMax lead-gen campaigns. Search themes can be configured directly inside Campaign Automator templates and inside Shopping Campaign Management’s Advanced Settings, so you don’t need to switch into Google Ads separately to add them.
When it comes to managing Performance Max campaigns, audience signals are one lever among several and may often not be the most important one.
View, analyze, and report on the performance of PMax campaigns
You can view and analyze the performance of your campaigns on the Account Dashboard, in Rule Engine, and in audits.
Classify Performance Max campaign performance by channels
Google’s native reporting makes it harder than it should be to see exactly where your Performance Max budget is going. The PMax Channel Distribution widget on the Account Dashboard fills that gap. It breaks down where your spend actually landed across four categories: Shopping, Video, Display, and Other, where Other covers Search, Gmail, Maps, and Discover.
You can also drill down campaign by campaign to see if the mix looks right for your goals
Google has since added its own channel-level reporting directly inside the Performance Max interface, so you’re no longer relying on a third-party widget as your only window into channel spend. That’s a genuine improvement, but treat the data the same way either place you see it: it’s diagnostic, not a kill switch.
If YouTube’s ROAS looks worse than Search’s, that’s expected. Performance Max isn’t trying to make every channel equally efficient — it’s trying to hit your overall goal within the budget and targets you’ve set. A weaker-looking channel may mean it hasn’t been tested aggressively yet. Use channel data to decide where a dedicated test might be worth running, rather than as a reason to restrict where PMax can spend.
Audit the structure of Performance Max campaigns
Performance Max campaigns are dependent on assets for their performance, so missing out on them is not advisable. You can use Optmyzr’s PPC account audits to find any missing components from your Performance Max campaigns.
For example, you can find the campaigns with Final URL Expansion turned off and choose to enable it in Google Ads, letting Google serve a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query.
P.S.: The Landing Page URL Checker covers Final URLs you’ve configured directly, not the pages Google generates through expansion. Those are monitored separately via the Landing Page URL Health Monitor on the Account Dashboard.
Beyond auditing for missing components, Optmyzr’s PMax Asset Optimization tool pulls all your text, image, and video assets into one view so you can assess creative performance without opening each asset group in Google Ads one at a time. It shows how your text assets are performing across the account, compares assets within the same asset group so you can see which ones are carrying their weight and which aren’t, and tells you at a glance whether a video was auto-created by Google or uploaded by you.
For each asset it recommends whether to keep, pause, replace, or refresh. Text assets can be edited and replaced in bulk across asset groups, and you can copy a winning headline or description to other groups using find-and-replace. For images and videos, open the asset group editor directly. That’s where you can add or swap creative and get AI suggestions alongside your existing assets.
Stay on top of PMax campaigns’ performance using alerts
PMax performance can shift overnight with no visible cause, which is exactly why alerting matters more here than in Search. You can track metrics like Impressions, clicks, conversions, or your own custom metrics using alerts in Optmyzr.
You can set your alerts here.
For example, if you set up an alert for Performance Max campaigns, the system is going to look at the average performance of your campaigns in an account and alert you if something goes wrong.
You can then further analyze if this change is because earlier you were receiving huge traffic from the Shopping channel and now you are not, or if there are some new competitors in the market that are causing you a loss in revenue.
You can also check the top competitors for your account in Optmyzr on the Account Dashboard.
Check broken URLs for Performance Max asset groups with the Landing Page URL Checker
A broken landing page in PMax keeps spending until something flags it. There’s no native alert when an asset group starts sending traffic to a 404 or an out-of-stock page. The Landing Page URL Checker runs scheduled checks across your asset groups and sitelinks, and can automatically pause the ones pointing to broken or unavailable pages so you’re not paying for clicks that lead nowhere.
Control when your PMax ads run with the Hour of the Week Bid Adjustments
Performance Max won’t take bid adjustments, and Smart Bidding ignores time-based modifiers anyway. What you can still decide is when your ads are eligible to run at all. If you know Sunday mornings never convert, or your sales team can’t pick up the phone after 7 pm, you can pull those hours out of the week and stop paying for clicks nobody follows up on.
Hour of the Week Bid Adjustments lets you set that schedule across a group of campaigns at once instead of editing each one in Google Ads, which is the difference between a five-minute change and an afternoon. The bid recommendations the tool surfaces won’t do anything for PMax, so treat it as a scheduling lever rather than a bidding one.
Exclude placements and locations that are expensive for the account
Performance Max doesn’t give you a lot of control to target the right keywords or have the right bid adjustment, but it does let you play with certain levers to define the scope of your advertisement.
Exclude low-performing placements for Performance Max campaigns
You can reduce costs and make sure only the right kind of traffic reaches your campaigns by excluding the placements that are not performing well for you.
- You can do it as a quick optimization using Account level placement exclusion. This will find mobile apps, YouTube videos and channels, and websites with no conversions and exclude them from the account.
- If you’d like to automate this optimization to check once every month and exclude the placements to reduce wasted spend, you can use the Rule Engine.
For a while, Google’s own documentation and support channels stated that placement exclusions for PMax only worked when applied through the Google Ads UI, not through the API.
That guidance turned out to be wrong: an experiment run by Optmyzr showed zero spend on excluded placements after applying exclusions via the API, and Google has since confirmed the API-based approach works. That’s what makes account-level exclusion and Rule Engine automation, as described above, fully reliable rather than a manual workaround.
Optmyzr’s Performance Max Placement Scope builds on this by tracking placement trends over time, flagging categories that are consistently irrelevant, and applying exclusions based on patterns rather than a single high-impression snapshot. For example, Levitate Foundry, a digital growth marketing firm managing fast-growing omnichannel brands, saw a 30% increase in PMax ROAS by systematically excluding low-intent placements. Separately, Optmyzr’s budget management tools saved the same team over 500 hours of manual work a year.
Exclude expensive locations from the campaign
You can choose to exclude cities, zip codes, or regions that are accruing costs but are not converting for your Performance Max campaigns.
The Rule Engine in Optmyzr can help you identify expensive locations for Performance Max campaigns and exclude them based on your own rules.
Add negative keywords to control which queries trigger your ads
PMax campaigns support up to 10,000 campaign-level negative keywords, matching the limit for Search campaigns, and you can add them directly in Google Ads without going through your Google rep.
Keep in mind these negatives apply to Search and Shopping inventory only. They won’t prevent your ads from appearing on Display, YouTube, Gmail, or Discover. For those channels, placement exclusions are the right lever. Google has also expanded the PMax Search Terms Report, giving you more visibility into the queries driving traffic and a clearer idea of what you may want to exclude.
In practice, you can add negative keywords directly inside Google Ads instead of submitting a request through your Google rep. Think of these as a companion to the placement and location exclusions covered above. Negative keywords help control which search queries can trigger your ads, while placement and location exclusions help control where those ads can appear.
Used alongside tools like Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and Placement Scope, these controls give you more ways to decide where PMax should, and shouldn’t, spend your budget.
Manage budgets for Performance Max campaigns
Monitor Performance Max budgets
PMax campaigns can burn through budget faster than Search when signals are broad, and by the time you notice overspend it’s usually already happened. Budget Monitors let you group the budgets you want to track, set a monthly spend cap, and choose what happens when it’s hit — a notification, an automatic pause, or both. At the start of the next billing cycle, paused campaigns re-enable automatically.
If you’re worried about automation moving a budget too aggressively in one pass, you can cap how much a single budget is allowed to change per automation run. Set a ±20% limit, for instance, and a $100 budget only ever moves between $80 and $120 at a time, so a PMax campaign never gets knocked back into learning by one big overnight jump.
Once you’ve got several budget monitors running, you’re not stuck reading through a separate email for every stage one fires. For instance, 50% reached, 90% reached, pause starting, re-enable starting, etc., since the non-urgent updates land in one grouped summary instead, while anything time-sensitive still reaches you right away.
Analyze Performance Max budgets
Use the Spend Projection to view daily and monthly spend patterns and to predict how much your Performance Max campaigns are likely to spend by the end of the budget cycle. By inserting your target budget, you’ll also see how much under or over the target the campaigns are likely to spend.
You can also analyze the Performance Max budget performance using the Reallocate and Optimize Budgets.
Instead of comparing campaigns one by one, the tool tests different ways your PPC budget could be distributed and suggests the option likely to have the biggest impact. You can go with that recommendation or optimize around the metric you care about, such as ROAS, conversions, conversion value, clicks, or CPA.
It can also help when a PMax campaign isn’t spending its full daily budget. The Budget Simulator shows how spend is expected to change as you increase the budget and where the campaign is likely to hit its maximum spending potential. If adding more budget isn’t expected to increase spend, that’s a good sign that budget isn’t the problem. You may be better off looking at other parts of the campaign, such as your assets or audience signals.
And if you’re managing PMax alongside campaigns on platforms like Meta or Microsoft Advertising, you can evaluate and reallocate those budgets together. You can also set limits by budget, platform, or channel so the tool doesn’t move more money than you’re comfortable with.
For teams managing a fixed budget across billing cycles, Premium accounts can also roll unused budget into the next cycle. That way, money left over at the end of one cycle can be carried forward rather than being left out of the next month’s target.
Read More: 4 Ways to Get More Out of Optmyzr’s Optimize Budgets Tool
Manage budget for Performance Max campaigns with automation
If you have set rules or settings to manage the budgets, you can automate this process in Optmyzr.
- You can choose to pause Performance Max campaigns when the campaign target budget is reached and re-enable them in the next month using the Flexible budgets script. Read more about this script here.
- You can also use Reach Target monthly budget script to reallocate budgets in order to spend the mentioned target budget. Read more about this script here.
- By using if-then-else statements, you can build conditional sequences varying from simple rule-based budget reports to more sophisticated workflows.
Read here for more information on Performance Max for scripts.
And if you want to start optimizing your Performance Max campaigns right away, take a 14-day free trial now.
