You launched your Performance Max campaign with high hopes, but now you’re just frustrated. The budget is being spent, but the leads are of low quality, or worse, there are no conversions at all. PMax can often feel like a “black box” where you have little control. Consequently, many marketers give up and assume the campaign is a failure. 

However, the problem often isn’t the campaign type itself, but the underutilized features hidden just below the surface. Google provides powerful tools to guide the AI and improve performance. Therefore, before you pause your campaign, let’s look at three hidden features you might be ignoring that can fix your conversion problem. 

Part 1: The Feature for Better Targeting 

1. Supercharge Your Audience Signals 

The most common mistake marketers make with a PMax campaign is providing weak or generic Audience Signals. While you may have added some keywords, this is only scratching the surface. The “hidden” power here is to layer in rich, first-party data. For instance, you should upload your customer lists, create custom segments based on your best-performing search keywords, and build audiences of users who have visited specific pages on your site. This gives the PMax algorithm a crystal-clear picture of your ideal customer, resulting in significantly higher-quality traffic. 

Part 2: The Feature for Better Control 

2. Implement Brand Exclusions 

Is your PMax campaign just stealing traffic from your branded search campaigns? This is a frequent and costly problem. A crucial feature many marketers ignore is Brand Exclusions. Buried in the campaign settings, this allows you to provide a list of your brand names and variations that you want to exclude from the campaign. As a result, PMax is forced to go find new customers, rather than just targeting users who are already searching for you by name. This ensures your campaign is genuinely incremental. 

Part 3: The Feature for Better Insights 

3. Analyze Asset Group Level Reporting 

Finally, you must stop treating your PMax campaign like an unoptimizable black box. While you can’t see keyword-level data, you can see how your assets are performing. Navigate to your Asset Group and view the “Assets” tab. Here, Google will give each headline, description, and image a performance rating like “Low,” “Good,” or “Best.” This insight is gold. By systematically replacing your “Low” performing assets with new, creative ones, you can continuously improve the overall performance of your campaign. 

Tips 

• Start with a very specific Audience Signal before gradually broadening it. 

• Update your customer lists regularly to keep your first-party data fresh. 

• When replacing “low-performing” assets, only change one or two at a time so you can track the impact. 

• Use location and language exclusions to further refine your targeting. 

Warnings 

• Don’t expect a new PMax campaign to be profitable in the first two weeks. It needs time to learn. 

• Avoid making drastic changes to the budget or bidding strategy too frequently, as this can reset the learning phase. 

• A PMax campaign is not a substitute for a well-structured search campaign, especially for protecting brand terms. 

• Never launch a PMax campaign without conversion tracking properly installed and tested. 

Things You’ll Need 

• A Google Ads account with conversion tracking enabled. 

• A list of your brand names and common misspellings (for exclusions). 

• Your first-party data (e.g., customer email lists) is ready to upload. 

• A variety of creative assets (headlines, images, videos) for testing.