Google Finally Gives Advertisers More Control Over Performance Max. About Damn Time.

Google has announced another round of Performance Max updates, and for once, we're not complaining about more automation.

We're celebrating more control over it.

On August 7, Google introduced additional campaign controls, expanded search themes, and improved reporting for Performance Max campaigns. Which is great, considering advertisers have spent years asking for the ability to see what the hell their campaigns are actually doing.

Don't get us wrong. We're not anti-automation. We're anti-blindly-trusting-an-algorithm-with-someone-else's-money.

And these updates? They're a step in the right direction.

TLDR;

Google's August 2025 Performance Max updates give advertisers more ways to control targeting, exclude irrelevant searches, and understand campaign performance.

• Campaign-level negative keyword lists make exclusions easier to manage.

• Search themes are expanding from 25 to 50 per asset group.

• Device and age controls are now broadly available, with gender-based controls entering beta.

• Search term reporting and additional diagnostics provide more visibility into what's happening behind the scenes.

The bigger takeaway? Google is giving advertisers more ways to guide its AI. That doesn't mean the AI should be making all the decisions.

First, Can We Talk About Negative Keywords?

One of the biggest frustrations with Performance Max has been the lack of straightforward control over irrelevant search traffic.

Imagine you're advertising luxury home remodeling services, but Google decides your ads should appear for searches related to DIY renovations.

Technically related? Sure.

Likely to generate a qualified lead for a $100,000 renovation? Probably not.

Campaign-level negative keywords were already rolling out earlier this year, but Google's August update introduces support for negative keyword lists at the campaign level.

That's important because it makes managing exclusions across campaigns significantly more practical.

Instead of repeatedly maintaining the same exclusions, advertisers can apply and manage lists more efficiently.

Our take: This should've been a basic feature from the beginning.

If we're responsible for performance, we should have reasonable control over where a client's budget isn't being spent.

That said, negative keywords aren't something to throw around every time a search term looks a little questionable. Overdoing exclusions can limit valuable traffic.

The goal is to eliminate obvious waste without strangling the algorithm.

50 Search Themes. Cool. But More Isn't Always Better.

Google is also doubling the number of search themes advertisers can provide, increasing the limit from 25 to 50 per asset group.

For anyone unfamiliar, search themes are signals you provide to Performance Max to help Google understand the searches your potential customers might make.

They're not traditional keywords, and they don't restrict the campaign to those searches.

Think of them as suggestions to the algorithm.

And now we get twice as many suggestions. Yay?

Here's where we think advertisers need to be careful.

Just because Google gives you 50 search themes doesn't mean you need to use all 50.

If you're running ads for a personal injury law firm, adding every remotely related legal phrase you can think of isn't necessarily going to improve performance.

We'd rather see a smaller group of intentional, high-value themes that reflect the services, customer needs, and search intent we're actually trying to capture.

More inputs don't automatically equal better strategy. Sometimes they just equal more noise.

More Demographic and Device Controls? Yes, Please.

Another welcome change is the broader availability of device targeting and age-based demographic controls.

Google is also introducing gender-based demographic controls in beta.

This gives advertisers more flexibility to align campaign delivery with the audiences and devices that make sense for their businesses.

But here's our obligatory reminder that having a targeting option doesn't mean you should immediately start excluding people.

Let's say your Google Ads account shows a higher cost per lead from users aged 55 and older. Does that mean you should exclude them? Not necessarily.

What if those leads have a significantly higher close rate or average customer value?

Congratulations, you may have just excluded one of your most profitable customer segments.

At Bluum, we'd rather make targeting decisions based on business outcomes than surface-level advertising metrics.

Finally, More Visibility Into What Performance Max Is Actually Doing

Google has been gradually improving Performance Max reporting throughout 2025, including the introduction of channel performance reporting in beta earlier this year.

The August announcement builds on that progress with expanded search term visibility, customer acquisition reporting, diagnostics, and additional creative insights.

Why does this matter? Because a campaign reporting 100 conversions at a $30 cost per conversion doesn't tell us nearly enough about whether it's working.

• Which searches are generating traffic?

• Which channels are contributing to conversions?

• Are we acquiring new customers or primarily reaching existing ones?

• Are the conversions actually valuable to the business?

• Is the campaign producing incremental results, or taking credit for demand that already existed?

Those questions are much more useful than simply celebrating a pretty dashboard.

And while these reporting improvements won't answer every attribution question, they give advertisers more information to investigate performance rather than blindly accepting the campaign's overall numbers.

That's progress.

So, Should You Be Running Performance Max?

Here's the answer nobody at Google wants to hear. Not necessarily.

Performance Max can absolutely have a place in a well-structured Google Ads strategy.

For ecommerce businesses with strong product feeds, reliable conversion values, and enough meaningful performance data, it can be a valuable tool for reaching customers across Google's inventory.

For lead-generation businesses, we're generally more cautious.

If you're optimizing toward every form submission without distinguishing between qualified prospects, spam, existing customers, and people looking for jobs, the algorithm may become very good at finding the wrong people.

And it'll happily spend your budget doing it.

Before recommending Performance Max, we'd want to understand the business model, existing campaign performance, conversion tracking, lead quality, and whether the account has enough reliable data to support automation.

We'd also want to understand what Performance Max is expected to accomplish that the existing campaigns aren't already doing.

Because launching another campaign type isn't a strategy. It's a setting.

Our Final Take: Automation Still Needs a Damn Strategy.

We're genuinely happy to see Google continuing to improve Performance Max controls and reporting.

Campaign-level negative keyword lists, expanded search themes, and more granular targeting give advertisers additional opportunities to guide campaigns instead of leaving everything up to the algorithm.

But let's not confuse having more controls with automatically having better performance.

A poorly structured account with inaccurate conversion tracking isn't going to magically improve because Google added another settings menu.

The fundamentals still matter. Good targeting. Good creative. Good landing pages. Accurate tracking. Actual business outcomes.

And someone who knows when to let the algorithm do its thing and when to tell it to knock it off.

Google can automate the execution. It can't replace the strategy.

At least, not one we'd trust with our clients' budgets.