Performance Max One campaign, every surface.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but there is an honest floor. Performance Max needs enough conversions each week to settle, so a budget that suits a tight Search campaign will often leave it permanently learning. The smallest companies we work with invest a minimum of A$3,000 a month in ad spend and our largest clients run multiple eight figures a month — and below roughly A$50K a month we usually find a well-built Search and Shopping account beats it. Our management fee is separate, and the first call is free.

Expect a learning period of roughly two to six weeks, and expect the first fortnight to look erratic — that is the system testing combinations, not a fault. Judging it in week one is the single most common way an account gets ruined, because every target change restarts the learning. We watch it daily and intervene where money is clearly going somewhere it should not, then read it properly from week three. Your budget, your conversion volume and how much history the account already had all move that timeline.

No long-term lock-in. We would rather keep the work because it is producing than because a contract says you have to stay. What we do ask for is enough runway to be fair to the account — and on this channel that matters more than most, because a campaign judged during its learning period is being judged at its worst. The terms are put in front of you in plain English before anything is signed.

We own and run the account, because the build is proprietary methodology refined across 250+ engagements — campaign architecture, exclusion libraries, audience stacks and conversion tracking. You get full-visibility reporting on performance and spend at all times, and on long-term marketing agreements ownership and handover options are available to discuss. You will never be in the dark about what is in the account or what it is doing.

We tell you, in the report, in plain English, and we change what we are doing. Usually that means rebuilding the asset groups, tightening the signals, or moving the budget back into Search and Shopping where you can see and control it. Turning Performance Max off is a legitimate outcome and we have done it. What we will not do is leave it running quietly because the campaign-level report still looks flattering.

A fixed cadence, good news or bad. Because Performance Max shows less than other campaign types, our reporting deliberately looks wider: total account cost per job or per sale, brand separated from non-brand, asset-group and asset-level performance, and what we changed and why. If the campaign improved but the account did not, you will read that sentence in the report rather than have to work it out yourself.

A regular campaign targets one surface with controls you can see: keywords, bids, placements, schedules, and reports you can act on. Performance Max runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps and Discover from one budget, and hands targeting, bidding and channel distribution to Google's automation. You still control the budget, the goal, the assets, the signals and a shorter list of exclusions. It is a genuinely different trade, not a better version of the same thing.

It can, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Exact-match keywords in your Search campaigns take precedence, so a well-built Search account holds most of its ground, but Performance Max will take the looser queries and your brand name unless it is excluded. We run brand exclusions from day one, keep Search structured tightly, and report brand separately from non-brand so you can see what is new demand and what is a reshuffle.

You control the budget, the goal and target, the conversion actions and their values, every asset, the audience signals and search themes, the feed, brand exclusions, account-level placement and content exclusions, and locations. Google decides which surface gets the money, which combination of your assets is shown, and to whom. That is the trade. It is a good trade for some accounts and a bad one for others, and the honest answer for yours comes out of the audit rather than out of a brochure.

It can be, with one condition: the automation has to be fed lead quality, not lead quantity. If every form submission counts the same, it will find you the cheapest form submissions in the country. We define one primary conversion that represents real money, attach values, and import qualified and won leads back from your CRM where the system allows it, so the learning is based on customers rather than clicks. Without that, we would generally keep the budget in Search.

For most stores, not instead — and often not yet. Standard Shopping keeps the product groups, the bids, the campaign priorities and a search terms report you can act on, and it reads the same feed. Performance Max reaches further and shows you less, and it outranks standard Shopping where the two overlap. Where an account has real purchase history and enough budget, running both deliberately with a clear split can work well. Deciding by accident never does.

Not to the level you can in a Search or Display campaign, and any agency telling you otherwise is guessing. Performance Max reports at campaign and asset-group level, with limited insight into placements and search categories. What we can do is build a baseline outside it, keep Search and Shopping running and separate, watch the whole account rather than the campaign, and log every change we make so the picture is reconstructable even where the platform is quiet.

When the account has little or no conversion history, when the tracking is not trustworthy yet, when the budget cannot feed the learning, when the margin is too thin to absorb a testing period, or when a tight Search and Shopping build has obvious room left in it. In those cases the honest recommendation is to fix the foundations first and revisit this in a few months. We would rather say that than sell you the campaign type everyone is talking about.