Google Performance Max Campaign Updates 2025: Key Features & Improvements

Google has introduced a range of exciting updates to its Performance Max Campaigns, giving advertisers more control, transparency, and deeper insights into campaign performance. These enhancements improve campaign precision, enable better AI-driven decision-making, and provide clearer reporting tools.

In this blog, we’ll understand the key features of these updates and how they can help you optimize your Performance Max campaigns in the year ahead.

What’s New in Google Performance Max Campaign Updates 2025?

The improved version of Google PMax Campaigns includes new campaign controls to guide AI, enhanced search reporting, and better asset group reporting. The overall aim is to empower advertisers to leverage the power of Google’s AI better while maintaining control and understanding the campaign factors.

New Campaign Controls:

1. Negative Keywords

This highly requested feature, allows you to add negative keywords to your PMax Campaign. It will let you exclude specific search queries, providing more control over where ads appear for brand suitability or other reasons.

As of now, Google has not fully rolled out the feature to add negative keywords directly within Performance Max (PMax) Campaigns. However, you can manage negative keywords at the account level to influence your PMax campaigns.

For example, a sports shoe brand can exclude “formal” or “leather” to avoid irrelevant traffic which consumes an unnecessary budget.

2. New Customer Acquisition Goal

Previously in beta, Google has now rolled out this feature allowing advertisers to specify high-value customers using Customer Match data in their PMax Campaigns. Google’s AI will then prioritize and bid higher for users predicted to have high lifetime value. It prioritizes bidding towards new customers while maintaining your engagement with potential returning customers.

Reporting is also available at the campaign level so you can see how many new customers your campaign is driving, and how many were high-value new customers.

3. Brand Exclusions

For campaigns using product feeds, advertisers can now apply brand exclusions separately to search text ads and shopping ads. Previously, a brand exclusion blocked your ads in both formats. This update lets you exclude your brand terms from Search text ads while still allowing them to trigger your Shopping ads.

This is helpful if you want to manage branded traffic differently for each ad type, prioritizing Shopping ads for brand searches while managing Search text ads for those terms in a separate campaign.

4. “URL Contains” Rules

Performance Max campaigns with product feeds will now support “URL contains” targeting rules, a feature already available in standard Performance Max campaigns.  These rules allow you to target specific website page categories based on their URL.

For example, if you’re advertising for a bookstore, you can target “URL contains ‘fiction’” to target users interested in fiction books while excluding the other URLs.

5. Demographic Exclusions (Beta) 

A new beta feature that will allow excluding age brackets (e.g., 18-24, 65+) from campaign targeting.

6. Device Targeting (Beta)

Another new beta feature, which allows targeting traffic by devices like computers, mobile, or tablets.

Deeper Search Reporting:

1. Search Themes Usefulness Indicator

Performance Max is getting enhanced reporting, including more detail. Search themes allow you to specify search queries your customers use, supplementing Performance Max’s own targeting based on your provided assets.

It includes:

Search terms insights, which differentiate queries originating from Performance Max’s automatic targeting versus your specified search themes, and

A “usefulness” indicator for each search theme, showing how effectively it’s driving additional traffic beyond what Performance Max would find independently.

These new insights help determine if your search themes are providing incremental value or need refinement.

Improved Asset Group Reporting:

1. Segmented Asset Group Performance

Performance Max’s asset group reporting is also being improved.  The ability to segment asset group performance is now available for all campaigns, allowing for more granular breakdowns of results, including conversions by device, time, and other dimensions. 

Moreover, this data is now downloadable from your Google Ads interface, making it accessible and shareable.

These are the Google Performance Max Campaign Updates 2025.

Google is constantly upgrading its campaign with exciting new features, enhanced controls, and powerful insights. If you haven’t launched your Google PMax Campaign yet, now’s the perfect time to jump in, take advantage of all the interesting tools, and start optimizing your campaigns.