The ten questions behind every Performance Max campaign we build

Almost all the Performance Max accounts we audit for the first time have an ad strength rated Average, sometimes Poor, across most of their live campaigns. Every campaign still runs and errors don’t appear anywhere, so the gap goes unnoticed while it compounds for each day the campaign keeps spending. Ten decisions go into a Performance Max build, and missing even one of them is enough to cap that score.

What do you need to get right when you build a Performance Max campaign?

The fix we’ve found is to run the same ten questions every time.

1. Confirm Brand or Generic before anything else. A Brand campaign targets people already searching your name, whereas a Generic one targets people who aren’t, and mixing them in one campaign lets cheap brand conversions crowd out the budget meant for new customers.

2. Name the objective and the conversion action to chase. Such as Purchase for an ecommerce account chasing Sales, or a trial sign-up for a SaaS account chasing Leads. Decide on this early before you touch the build, since every downstream setting depends on it.

3. Match budget and bidding to where the campaign is. Our default is Maximise Conversions to begin to get volume through the campaign, with a tCPA or tROAS added once the campaign has the minimum 30 conversions for smart bidding to kick in.

4. Decide where you’re targeting. Location is one of the first answers needed.

5. Give each asset group one landing page. Read your landing pages the way a customer would, and build each asset group from what’s on them, anchored to one page each.

6. Start from the search terms already converting. Check the keywords and search terms already converting in your live account, and decide Exact, Phrase or Broad for each one rather than defaulting every search theme to Broad. Performance Max takes up to 50 search themes, so use all 50.

7. Exclude your competitors and sort out your negatives. Check that no negative blocks one of your own keywords, and that the negatives carried over from the last build still earn their place.

8. Write headlines and descriptions to a set mix. Our default is fifteen: 3 brand, 5 USP (unique selling point), 3 call to action and 4 campaign-specific.

9. Fill every asset slot. That means at least six sitelinks, plus callouts.

10. Choose your audiences, then verify them on the platform. Suggested segments are a starting point. Check each one in Google Ads before launch and include at least one audience that uses first-party data from your organisation for better targeting.

Google’s ad strength rating depends on whether a campaign has enough keywords, enough negatives and enough assets. Ten small items are easy to skip when you build under time pressure, and that is how so many accounts end up rated Average.

How does Addesu get this right?

Our Campaign Brief Generator exists to make the list run the same way on every build.

You give it a client’s website, so it can see how the brand writes and which pages your sitelinks should point to. You also give it a couple of exports from Google Ads: your current ad copy, and your current keywords or search terms. It isn’t connected to the account directly, and it tells you what to export at each step.

What comes out is a workbook with the ad copy, search themes and keywords ready to paste into the platform. From the first question to the finished workbook it takes only ten to fifteen minutes. It runs on the same rules as our Ad Strength Improver, so a brand-new launch and a refresh of live ads are held to one standard.

The checks run before anything reaches your account. Some problems are hard stops: copy over a character limit, a brand term in a Generic campaign, a match type the campaign wasn’t scoped to use. Others are warnings that a person reviews before launch: the same keyword in two ad groups, a negative that blocks one of the campaign’s own keywords, a Generic campaign that hasn’t excluded every brand term. Anything we don’t know yet is marked TBC and highlighted amber in the workbook, so the gap stays visible.

What has it changed so far?

We’re still early with this, but one of our homeware clients already shows what it can do. Searches for gift hampers were converting in its account, even though hampers are a product line the brand doesn’t actively promote, and nothing in the build targeted them. The generator flagged them. The asset group we built around those phrases, using all 50 search themes Performance Max allows, is now one of the strongest in that account.

On a separate subscription-service client, we used the same underlying logic to rewrite a set of live ads rated Average for ad strength. The new copy came out rated Excellent across the board, and it outperformed what was running before.

Nothing got missed in either case: every keyword that had already converted, every sitelink slot and every negative was accounted for before launch.

Final takeaway

A tool that makes every build this thorough means you stop leaving conversions on the table. It checks all ten decisions above, and the search terms already converting are only one of them.