How to audit a Performance Max campaign

Last checked against Google’s documentation on 30 September 2026.

How to audit a Performance Max campaign: the short answer

Audit Performance Max in the order its decisions are made. First check what it optimises for: the conversion goals and the bid strategy. Then check where the money goes: channels, search terms, and your own brand searches. Then check what the ads are made of: asset groups and signals. Last, check where ads are allowed to show: landing pages, placements, and locations. Fixing assets before goals is wasted work, because the campaign will keep chasing whatever the goals count.

Performance Max shows far more than it used to. Channel reporting, full search terms reporting, campaign-level negative keywords, device targeting, and demographic exclusions all arrived during 2025, as Google’s Google Ads highlights of 2025 lists. If you last audited a Performance Max campaign before 2025, several of these checks were not possible then.

Feed-based or lead gen? Performance Max runs two ways. A retail campaign linked to a Merchant Center product feed can serve Shopping ads and is usually judged on conversion value. A lead generation or service campaign has no feed and lives on text, images, and video, and it is judged on leads that become customers. Every check below applies to both; where they differ, it says so.

Use at least the last 30 days, and leave out the most recent days if your conversions take a week or more to come in.

Checks 1–2: what the campaign optimises for

1. Conversion goals and customer acquisition

Open the campaign’s settings and look at Conversion goals. A campaign either uses the account-default goals or campaign-specific ones. Google says that in general it’s best to use account-default goals so campaigns learn from each other, and that changes to account-level goals won’t reach campaigns that aren’t strictly using them. When you create a Performance Max campaign, Google’s setup guide fills in your account goals automatically, so a campaign can inherit a goal nobody chose on purpose.

What bad looks like:

• A page view, scroll, or button click counted as a goal next to purchases or leads.
• Retail: purchases with no value, or one default value on every order when real order values differ.
• Lead gen: every form submission counted as a win, including spam. If you can, import qualified or closed leads so the campaign optimises toward leads that become customers.
• A campaign on campaign-specific goals that nobody remembers setting, so account-level fixes never reached it.

Then check the customer acquisition setting. Google’s customer lifecycle goals page describes modes that bid more for new customers or only for new customers. The new customer value modes need purchase conversion goals; new customer only is the mode Google suggests for lead generation or strict acquisition budgets. Google tells new from existing customers using data such as your customer lists and website tag, and its bidding setup page says bidding for new customers only needs an audience segment with at least 1,000 active members. Bad: the setting switched on with no reliable list of existing customers behind it.

2. Bid strategy, targets, and budget

Performance Max bids with Maximize conversions or Maximize conversion value, each with an optional target: a target cost per action or a target return on ad spend. Google recommends value bidding when you track values, and Maximize conversions when you don’t.

• Strategy fits the data. Bad: value bidding when every conversion carries the same value, which gives the campaign nothing to rank by.
• Target matches reality. Bad: a target far from what the campaign actually achieves, or a target changed every few days. See why Target CPA stops spending.
• Budget status. Google changed how budget-limited campaigns with a target behave on 17 August 2026, and Performance Max is included. If the campaign shows “Limited by budget”, read the Target CPA and ROAS change before touching the target.

Checks 3–5: where the money goes

3. Channel performance

Go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → Channel performance. Google’s channel performance report splits results across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Maps, Gmail, and Search partners, for dates after 6 June 2025. Compare each channel’s share of cost with its share of conversions or conversion value.

Also read the status column: “Missing required assets” or “Eligible (Limited)” means a channel is held back by something you can fix. Retail: segment by Ads using product data to separate Shopping formats from the rest. You can’t set a budget per channel; Google lists assets, signals, tracking, search themes, and exclusions as the levers. The channel performance report guide covers every part of the report.

4. Search terms and negative keywords

Open Insights and reports → Search terms and switch the view to Search terms and landing pages for Performance Max. Google’s Performance Max search terms report has data from March 2023 and shows the landing page for each search. Sort by cost. Bad: searches for things you don’t sell, job seekers, or free and do-it-yourself intent, spending with no conversions. Google allows up to 10,000 negative keywords per Performance Max campaign, plus negative keyword lists and account-level negatives, all for Search and Shopping inventory only. The method is in Performance Max negative keywords.

5. Brand overlap

In the same report, filter for your brand name and its misspellings and add up the cost and conversions. If a large share of what Performance Max reports is your own brand, its results say little about finding new customers. Google’s brand exclusions apply to Search, Shopping, and YouTube search inventory in Performance Max. Retail: there is an option to still allow Shopping ads on searches for excluded brands, so decide on purpose. Whether to exclude your brand at all is covered in Performance Max cannibalising brand search.

Checks 6–7: asset groups and signals

6. Asset groups, ad strength, and video

Open Asset groups in the Campaigns menu and switch to the table view. For each asset group, check ad strength and whether every asset type is filled in. Google’s Performance Max ad strength page rates asset groups from Incomplete to Excellent and says a Poor asset group only serves to some of the available inventory. Google’s asset specs allow up to 15 headlines, 5 long headlines, 5 descriptions, 20 images, and 5 logos, plus videos.

Check video separately. If an asset group has no video, Google’s specs say one or more videos may be auto-generated from your other assets, and its video automation page says auto-generated videos stop when you upload your own. Bad: an asset group running on videos nobody at the business has watched. Google’s tips recommend at least one video in each orientation: horizontal, vertical, and square.

Retail: a feed-only campaign, with no text, images, or video, is a valid setup; Google offers an asset testing experiment to measure what adding assets would do. Lead gen: every asset group needs a full set of assets, and the channel report flags missing call or lead form assets.

7. Audience signals and search themes

Audience signals are suggestions, not targeting. Google’s audience signals page says Performance Max may show ads to people outside your signals if they are likely to convert. The strongest signals come from your own data: customer lists, website visitors, and custom segments built from the searches your customers make.

• Bad: no signal at all, or a signal made only of broad interest categories that would fit any business.
• Bad: relying on signals to keep ads away from people. Signals don’t restrict reach; locations, exclusions, and customer acquisition settings do.
• Bad: search themes describing things you don’t sell. Each asset group can now hold up to 50 search themes, and Google treats them like phrase or broad keywords when choosing which of your campaigns serves a search.

Checks 8–10: where ads can show

8. Final URL expansion and URL exclusions

Google’s Final URL expansion page says it is on by default in Performance Max and lets the campaign send people to a more relevant page on your domain instead of the final URL you set. The setting sits under Asset optimization in the campaign settings, where Exclude some URLs adds URL exclusions.

To audit it, read the landing page column of the Performance Max search terms report. Bad for lead gen: traffic to blog, careers, login, or support pages, where a visitor can’t become a lead. Bad for retail: traffic to pages with no buying path, or out-of-stock products. Either exclude those URLs or turn expansion off and list the pages you want with a page feed. Google says page feeds only restrict the campaign to those URLs when expansion is off.

9. Placements and content suitability

See where ads appeared in Insights and reports → Report editor → Performance Max campaigns placement (Google’s placement report guide). Google says to use it for brand safety, not to judge performance. For Performance Max, placement exclusions are managed at the account level, under Tools → Content suitability, with up to 65,000 per account. Google’s brand suitability page for Performance Max adds inventory types, excluded content categories, and excluded content keywords for Display and video. Bad: sites, apps, or channels you would never want next to your brand, with nobody having looked at the list.

10. Locations, languages, devices, and demographics

Open the campaign settings and check the locations, and which location option the campaign uses. Google’s location options page describes “Presence or interest” as the default, which can reach people outside your area who have shown interest in it. For a business that only serves people who are physically there, that is a leak; see ads showing outside your target location.

Then check languages and ad schedule, and the newer controls listed on Google’s campaign settings page: device targeting (computers, mobile phones, tablets, TV screens) and demographic exclusions by age and gender. Bad: a regulated product with no age exclusion, or a device excluded on a hunch with no data behind it.

The Performance Max audit checklist

Copy this into a spreadsheet and write the number that proves each finding next to it.

For the rest of the account around Performance Max, use the Google Ads audit checklist.

What to fix first

Rank findings by money at stake, not by how many there are. A wrong conversion goal outweighs every asset finding combined, because it points the whole campaign at the wrong result.

Write each finding as evidence plus action. For example, “Display took 42% of spend and brought 14% of conversions, and the channel report shows a missing square image” is a fix waiting to happen. “PMax feels off” is not.

Demo data

Test big changes with experiments

Small, clear fixes such as a negative keyword or a URL exclusion don’t need a test. Changes that reshape the campaign do: switching goals, adding a target, turning off Final URL expansion, or deciding whether Performance Max should run at all. Google’s Performance Max experiments page lists three kinds: uplift experiments, which measure what Performance Max adds next to your other campaigns; upgrade experiments, such as Standard Shopping vs Performance Max for retail; and optimisation experiments that test one setting, such as Final URL expansion or assets.

Run the full audit when you take over an account, after a big change, and at least once a quarter. Check search terms, channel mix, and spend against budget weekly, since those drift fastest.