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Google Performance Max; Finally, Some Visibility

TLDR;


For the first time since Google Performance Max rolled out, Google gave advertisers something they’ve been asking for:


Visibility.


Not control. Not full transparency like search campaigns. But enough signal to stop running these campaigns completely blind.


If you’ve been in paid media for a while, you know how big of a shift that is.

Because up until this point, Performance Max worked like this:

  1. You fed it budget, assets, and a goal.

  2. It went off and ran across every placement Google owns.

  3. And you judged it purely on output.


If performance dipped, there was no real way to diagnose why. You either trusted it or you didn’t.


June 2025 didn’t fix that. But it cracked the door open.


What actually changed with Google Performance Max

The biggest update was the expansion of search term insights inside Performance Max. You still don’t get a clean keyword report. But you now get something close enough to be useful 👉🏻 You can see query categories and themes.


That means instead of guessing what kind of searches are driving traffic, you can start to understand the intent behind it.


You can see whether you’re showing up for:

  • High-intent, relevant demand

  • Broad, exploratory searches

  • Or low-quality, misaligned traffic


At the same time, asset group reporting improved. Slightly.


Before, asset groups were mostly a structural suggestion. Now, you can start to see which ones are actually contributing to performance and which ones are just sitting there.


It’s not perfect. But it’s no longer a total black box.

Why this matters more than people think

Most advertisers are going to look at this update and think:


“Nice, more data.”


That’s not the point.


The point is that you can finally start making decisions based on what’s actually happening inside the campaign.


Before this, wasted spend could sit in your account and you’d never see it. If Performance Max started drifting into irrelevant searches, there was no clean way to catch it early.


Now there is.


You can look at query themes and immediately tell:

  • This aligns with what we’re selling

  • This is too broad

  • This has no business being here


That alone shortens the feedback loop. And in paid media, speed of feedback is everything.

The part most people will still get wrong

This update doesn’t mean Performance Max should replace search. If anything, it proves the opposite. Performance Max is still not built for precision. It’s built for expansion.

Search is where you control intent. Performance Max is where you explore beyond it.

The problem is most accounts either:

  • Rely too heavily on Performance Max and lose control, or

  • Avoid it entirely because they don’t trust it


The better approach is running both, intentionally. Now that you can see query themes, you can actually connect the two.

You can:

  • Take what’s working in Performance Max and pull it into non-brand search

  • Identify overlap instead of guessing it

  • Reduce cannibalization instead of hoping the system figures it out


This is where the update becomes valuable. Not inside Performance Max itself, but in how it informs everything around it.

What we’re actually doing with it

This didn’t change the strategy. It just made execution cleaner.

  • Using Performance Max insights to guide search builds instead of guessing

  • Tightening asset groups so each one has a clear purpose

  • Catching intent mismatches earlier instead of waiting for performance to tank

  • Aligning landing pages with real query behavior, not assumptions


None of that is new. It’s just faster now.

What hasn’t changed

It’s still not fully transparent. You still can’t see every search term. You still don’t have real placement control. You’re still relying on automation more than most people are comfortable with.


So if you’re expecting this to suddenly feel like a standard search campaign, it won’t. Hate to break it to you, BUT...we're getting closer.

Final take

June 2025 didn’t fix Performance Max, but it did make it usable in a way it wasn’t before.


You don’t have full control. You probably won’t anytime soon. But you now have enough visibility to understand what’s happening and adjust accordingly. And that’s the difference between running campaigns on hope and running them with intent.

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