Starting in the fall of 2024, Google made a series of announcements stating that they are making Performance Max even more powerful. Their main objective was to give advertisers greater control, deeper insights, and enhanced creative capabilities for the campaign type. More features are always welcome, but in 2025, maximizing ROAS continues to be top of mind for business owners and digital marketing professionals. We’ve waded through the changes and tested features in the platform so you don’t have to. Here are the most powerful and relevant updates to Performance Max for your marketing campaigns.
More Control for Your Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max campaigns have become a staple for advertisers, many of whom have expressed the need for more control. One huge update is that Performance Max will now (finally!) allow campaign-level negative keywords, so you can exclude queries that don’t align with your brand or perform well. In the past, the only way to add these negatives involved a back-and-forth via email with Google support, filling out documents and waiting for the changes to be implemented on the backend. Now, you can make these changes yourself, which is a welcome addition (and one that should have been available at launch, in our opinion). You can do so under Account Settings, which will automatically apply to all search and shopping ads, including Performance Max.
Need more precision? If you rely on product feeds, the new “URL contains” rules let you focus on specific page categories, while brand exclusions now offer more flexibility—separating Search ads from Shopping ads for better control over visibility.
Additionally, a new “high value” customer acquisition goal prioritizes users likely to bring long-term value, helping you invest in the right audience. This was rolled out in beta for select advertisers in 2024, and launching for all to try in 2025. We’ve benefitted from segmenting our Performance Max campaigns into ‘New’ and ‘Existing’ customers, so we are eager to try this new ‘high value’ customer acquisition goal.
Success Indicators for Search Themes
Understanding what’s driving your ad performance is key to making smart decisions. With Performance Max’s newly launched search reporting enhancements, you’ll get deeper insights into what’s working. A search themes usefulness indicator shows whether your chosen themes are adding value, while a new source column in search term insights reveals whether queries are coming from keywordless AI targeting or your provided search themes. In addition to these features, we’ve seen Google roll out an ‘Incremental Traffic’ indicator for select search themes that ‘find additional traffic beyond what is being captured by your URLs and creative assets.’
We didn’t see a formal announcement from Google regarding this change; as is often the case, it appears they rolled it out in beta for users to try without an explanation. We are interested to see how these search themes lead to increased reach and how they affect performance.
Enhanced Asset Group Level Reporting for Greater Transparency
If you love digging into data, asset group reporting is now more detailed, allowing you to segment performance by device, time, and more. And the best part? You will now be able to download this data, making it easier to analyze trends and refine your strategy outside of the Google Ads UI. We tested downloading the asset group data report in Google Ads recently, and this feature was still not available in our accounts. Keep an eye out for the full launch of this feature soon, as it will definitely be a time-saver!
Optimizing Assets With Experiments and Generative AI
Creativity plays a huge role in ad success, and Google is making it easier to experiment with new assets. Soon, you’ll be able to test how adding different images, text, and video assets impacts your campaign’s performance. Additionally, final URL expansion testing is now available, so you can see if AI-selected landing pages lead to stronger conversions. We’re sure any fan of A/B testing creative (who isn’t?) will want to give these features a try in 2025.
Google’s AI-powered Imagen 3 model is also stepping in to help you create high-quality visuals that resonate with your audience. And to streamline collaboration, ad preview sharing has been expanded—now, teams can review and approve ad creatives even if they don’t have a Google Ads login. Like many marketing companies in 2025, AI is at the forefront of what we’re doing in Paid Search and beyond. It’s always great to see Google investing in improving their AI experience, which has previously been okay, with their image creation and ad copy tools leaving something to be desired. We’ll see if this update changes that!
Expanding Reach With AI-Powered Video Enhancements
Video is an essential tool for engaging customers, and now, Google AI has made it a goal to help their advertisers make the most of their content. Performance Max can automatically flip your existing videos into different aspect ratios, ensuring they look great across all YouTube placements. Additionally, AI-powered shortening selects key moments to create more concise, engaging ads that retain your original message. In our experience, adding quality video content to PMax is one of the simplest but most effective upgrades for Google Ads. We’re excited to test these tools, as they could be handy when a client gives you a video with a certain length or specs that could be altered for better performance.
Priority Shift for Shopping Campaigns
One of the biggest updates is how Performance Max interacts with Standard Shopping campaigns. Previously, Performance Max was automatically prioritized, but that’s changing. Now, Google will use Ad Rank to determine which campaign serves an ad when both are targeting the same products in the same account. This shift aligns Performance Max with Demand Gen, a more transparent approach to campaign prioritization. We’re interested to test different configurations of Shopping, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns to see what combo works best with this new prioritization convention. This update could be key to better understanding the performance difference between Performance Max and Standard Shopping.
Final Thoughts
The most recent Performance Max updates are all about giving you more control, better insights, and smarter automation. Whether you’re fine-tuning your targeting, leveraging AI-driven creative enhancements, or optimizing your Shopping campaigns, Performance Max is evolving to help you succeed.
As we venture full steam into 2025, now is the time to test these new features, analyze your results, and refine your strategy. Are you ready to take your advertising to the next level? Eight Oh Two is a proven leader in search engine and performance marketing focused on driving superior results by leveraging best-in-class technology with the very best in human intelligence. Contact us today to learn how we can help optimize your paid search program & Performance Max campaigns.
Sources:
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/15535462?hl=en
https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/new-performance-max-features-2025
