Performance Max in 2026: what advertisers can now see and control, and when it suits a small shop

What Performance Max is, in one paragraph

Performance Max, or PMax, is a Google Ads campaign type that shows your ads across all of Google from one campaign: Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You give it a goal, such as online sales or leads, plus your text, images, videos and often a product feed. Google's AI decides where to show what, and how much to bid. That is how Google describes it.

The problem was always the same. You gave Google your money and got results back, but you could not see where the money went. When I ran retail campaigns, that made it hard to explain results to anyone, including myself.

What you can see now

Channel performance report

Google first showed the channel performance report at Google Marketing Live in 2025. By November 2025 Google said it was available in all Performance Max campaigns, with search partners being added and access through manager accounts coming. It shows how your campaign performs on each channel, so you can see, for example, whether most spend goes to YouTube while most sales come from Search. You can also download and segment the data.

Search terms

Search terms reporting is now available for all PMax campaigns and through the API, according to Google's page on visibility and control in Performance Max. A source column shows whether a search came from PMax's own matching or from a search theme you added. Search themes are short phrases you give Google to hint at what people search for. The limit went from 25 to 50 per asset group.

Asset and asset group reporting

You can now see full stats for each asset, such as conversions, cost and clicks. Since early 2025 you can also break down asset group results, for example by device and time, and download them. Google announced this in January 2025. You can also see, and remove, the text that Google generated through text customisation and final URL expansion.

Budget, audience and placement reports

In January 2026 Google listed more PMax updates for 2026: a budget report that projects your spend to the end of the month and shows what a budget change may do, audience reports by age and gender, and placement reports you can split by network to see where ads appeared.

What you can control now

• Negative keywords. Campaign-level negative keywords rolled out to all advertisers in early 2025. Later in 2025 Google added negative keyword lists you can apply to several PMax campaigns at once. Use them to block searches like "free", "jobs" or "second hand" if they do not suit you.
• Brand exclusions. Retail campaigns with a product feed can apply brand exclusions only to Search text ads, so branded Shopping ads can still run.
• Age and device. Age exclusions and device targeting moved out of beta. Gender controls were in beta in the second half of 2025.
• Your own customer lists. You can exclude first-party lists, for example past buyers, if your goal is new customers.
• New customer goal. You can tell PMax to value new customers more, and with high value mode, focus on new customers who look like your best ones.
• "URL contains" rules. Campaigns with a feed can now include or exclude pages by words in the URL, such as a category name.

Google also added goal diagnostics that flag missing or broken conversion tags. If you see one of these warnings, fix it first. Everything else depends on it.

What has not changed

More reports do not mean PMax is now a manual campaign. You still cannot set bids per channel or choose exactly where every euro goes. Google still decides the mix. And PMax still depends on three things you control:

1. Conversion tracking. PMax bids on what you tell it is a conversion. If it counts page views or button clicks as sales, it will chase the wrong people.
2. Assets. Text, images and ideally a short video. Google's own advice is to give text, images and videos, and to keep products in an asset group matched to the landing page.
3. Enough budget and data. Google's tools suggest Low, Medium and High budgets to avoid a slow start. A campaign starved of budget learns slowly.

When PMax is a good fit for a small shop

From what I have seen with retail and local businesses, PMax tends to make sense when most of these are true:

• You sell products online and have a clean product feed in Google Merchant Center.
• Purchases or leads are tracked properly, ideally with real order values.
• You already get a steady number of conversions each month, not one or two.
• You have decent images, and ideally some video, of your products.
• You have a Search campaign for your brand and main products, so you can compare.

It tends to be a poor fit when tracking is broken, when you sell one service in one town, when you have very few conversions, or when you need to control exactly which searches you show up for. In those cases a well-built Search campaign usually teaches you more for the same money.

What this means for businesses in Cyprus and Greece

Cyprus is a small market and much of Greece outside Athens and Thessaloniki is too. Small markets mean fewer conversions, and fewer conversions mean slower learning for any automated campaign. That is not a reason to avoid PMax, but it is a reason to keep things simple: one PMax campaign, a few asset groups split by product type, not ten.

Use the new controls with local sense. Negative keywords can block searches for "jobs" or for competitor towns. Location settings should match where you really deliver. If you serve only Cyprus, check you are not paying for clicks from Greece because your site is in Greek. And look at the search terms: Greeklish and English searches show up a lot here, and you want to know which ones bring sales.

Questions people ask

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Sources

1. About Performance Max campaigns, Google Ads Help
2. Kick off 2025 with new Performance Max features, Google, January 2025
3. Unlock more visibility and control in Performance Max, Google Ads Help, September 2025
4. Access new inventory and channel performance reporting in Performance Max campaigns, Google Ads Help, November 2025
5. New Performance Max steering and reporting updates coming in 2026, Google, January 2026
6. Google wraps up Performance Max feature rollouts in 2025, PPC Land, August 2025