If your Performance Max campaign isn’t performing as expected, it may be due to specific problems with your targeting, conversion tracking, or campaign settings.
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Before you begin
You can create Performance Max campaigns to advertise with little setup or creative input. These goal-based campaigns use Google AI and experimentation to successfully meet your objectives and optimize performance on channels such as Discover feed, Display, Gmail, Google Maps, Google partner websites, Google Search, and YouTube. If you're encountering errors during campaign creation, publishing, or saving, like "Could not find the entity" or a generic error, review the troubleshooting steps in this article. Learn more about how to Create a Performance Max campaign.
When it’s time to review a campaign’s performance, keep the following in mind:
- Change takes time: Performance Max campaigns require a learning phase to stabilize. Allow 2–3 weeks after any significant changes (like budget or bid adjustments) before analyzing results. Avoid making frequent changes during this period.
- Set a sufficient budget: Ensure your daily budget is sufficient for your target audience and conversion goals. If limited by budget, the AI might find cheaper inventory (like YouTube or Display) to maximize conversions within your constraints.
- Review the right metrics: Performance Max exclusively supports conversion and value-based Smart Bidding. Confirm that your success metrics match your campaign goals.
- Example: If using "Maximize conversion value” (with tROAS), review "conversion value/cost (Actual ROAS)” and "conversion volume” rather than clicks or impressions. If performance drops after changing strategies, consider reverting to more flexible targets (for instance, Target ROAS).
- Learn more about how to Pick the right bid strategy.
- Learn more about Smart Bidding bid strategies.
- Learn more About automated bidding.
Instructions
Steps to troubleshoot errors during campaign setup
- Check the asset group setup and determine if any limits have been exceeded. Account limits can sometimes cause errors during campaign creation. Consider removing or consolidating old or paused campaigns. If necessary, contact your account manager to request a limit increase.
- Learn more about how to Build an asset group and review asset group best practices.
- Example: 16 headlines have been added but the campaign has a limit of 15 headlines.
- For advertisers with a Merchant Center feed attached, ensure the Final URL matches the one attached in the Merchant Center.
- The URLs must match in order for the Performance Max campaign to be created.
- Check your Google Business Profile sync status. If a recently linked location is missing during setup, wait 24–48 hours for the Google Business Profile and Google Ads sync to complete. Ensure the profile is fully "Verified" within the Google Business Profile manager.
Steps to troubleshoot other campaign serving issues
Campaign has low impressions or isn’t serving
Occasionally, you may find that your Performance Max campaigns don’t serve as many impressions as you would expect, or don’t spend much of your set daily budget. Learn How to fix Google Ads Performance Max campaign not running or low traffic.
Campaign is serving on unexpected or unsuitable landing pages
If you've noticed your ads are serving landing pages that you didn’t intend for the campaign, this may be because Final URL Expansion is turned on. When Final URL expansion is on, Google dynamically generates a headline, description, and other assets to match user search intent. Learn more about Final URL expansion with Performance Max.
If you don’t want Google to select alternate landing pages, you can opt out of the Final URL expansion feature by following the steps below:
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
.
- Select the Settings tab.
- Choose the Performance Max campaign that you want to edit.
- Under “Additional settings”, expand the “Final URL expansion” section.
- Choose to turn it off.
- Select Save.
.Campaign is serving unintended assets
If you've noticed your ads are serving unintended assets, it may be because Final URL Expansion is turned on. When Final URL expansion is on, Google dynamically generates a headline, description, and other assets to match user search intent. Learn more about Final URL expansion with Performance Max.
If you don’t want Google to select alternate landing pages, you can opt out of the Final URL expansion feature by following the steps below:
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
- Select the Settings tab.
- Choose the Performance Max campaign that you want to edit.
- Under “Additional settings”, expand the “Final URL expansion” section.
- Choose to turn it off.
- Select Save.
Ads serving on irrelevant or undesirable placements
Performance Max campaigns use an AI-driven, multi-channel approach and don't allow you to manually pause specific channels (like YouTube or Display). To influence spend distribution, focus on improving asset group strength and refining audience signals.
With placement exclusions, you can exclude your ads from serving on placements for specific pages, sites, mobile apps, and videos. Performance Max campaigns respect account-level and MCC-level placement exclusions. Use these to exclude unwanted YouTube content or apps that aren't appropriate for your brand. Campaign-level placement exclusions aren’t yet available. Learn more about how to Exclude placements at the account level.
Ads serving in unintended locations
To focus on users physically in your target areas, set your location targeting to Presence. Performance Max also offers Presence or interest (recommended), which includes people who have shown interest in your locations.
If you notice unwanted serving from non-targeted locations, add them as negative locations:
- Go to Locations within the Audiences, keywords and content drop down.
- Select the Exclusions tab.
- Select Edit locations (pencil icon).
- Enter a location to exclude and select Save.
Linking store locations: To link specific store locations, ensure your Google Business Profile is connected to Google Ads and create a Location Group. To restrict location assets from specific campaigns, use campaign-level filters to select "No location assets."
Check account-level placement exclusion lists in sub-accounts (within MCC)
- In your manager account, select the Accounts icon
, then select the Sub-account settings drop down in the section menu.
- Make sure the “Applied placement exclusion lists” is visible in the table. If it’s not, select the “Columns” icon
to add it.
- Under the “Applied placement exclusion lists” column for the campaign you’re checking,
- A dash will show if exclusion lists aren’t applied.
- A list name will show if exclusion lists are applied.
to add it.Check account-level placement exclusion lists in sub-accounts (within a sub-account)
- Go to Content within the Audiences, keywords and content drop down.
- From the drop-down menu, select Placement exclusions.
- Select Add filter, then select Level.
- Check the box next to the accounts you want to view campaigns for.
- Select Apply.
Steps to troubleshoot campaigns with a Merchant Center feed
For advertisers upgrading to Performance Max from Shopping campaigns:
- Text customization can’t be used with Shopping Ads.
- To minimize performance impact, we recommend that advertisers set similar budgets for Performance Max as their existing Shopping campaigns for the same products.
- Your Performance Max campaign may take 1–2 weeks to ramp up (the "learning phase"). Avoid frequent, drastic changes to your campaign during this time. After your Performance Max campaign is up and running, you should pause your Shopping campaign. If your Shopping campaign and Performance Max campaigns continue to run at the same time, the Shopping campaign may continue spending on some surfaces and not allow Performance Max to optimize fully.
Brand guidelines
With brand guidelines, you can control how your brand is represented in your automated assets or Performance Max campaign formats. You’ll be able to easily upload the following customizations in the same place once per campaign:
- Brand font
- Brand color
- Business name
- Business logo assets (1-5 images)
Most traffic coming from a single asset group:
- When setting up asset groups for your retail Performance Max campaign, ideally, you shouldn’t have an overlap in products targeted between asset groups (for example, Asset Group 1 and Asset Group 2 shouldn’t target both Products A to Z ; Asset Group 1 should only target Products A to L and Asset Group 2 should only target Products M to Z).
