Google wraps up Performance Max feature rollouts in 2025

Google announces latest Performance Max enhancements including campaign controls and expanded reporting capabilities.

Google announced major updates to its Performance Max campaigns on August 7, 2025, bringing enhanced visibility and control features for advertisers. The updates include campaign-level negative keyword lists, increased search theme limits, and new demographic targeting capabilities that have been rolling out throughout 2025.

According to the announcement, "In 2024, we launched a suite of powerful Performance Max features centered around improving controls and reporting capabilities. Performance Max gives you the full power of Google's channels and AI, all in one campaign to maximize your performance. In 2025, we'll continue growing Performance Max in several key areas to help you improve results and gain more transparency into what's driving performance." The updates represent Google's ongoing response to advertiser feedback about the need for greater control and visibility in automated campaign management.

The 2025 program encompassed three primary areas: enhanced audience controls, improved search reporting and guidance, and advanced creative reporting capabilities. These features represent Google's systematic effort to balance automation efficiency with advertiser control requirements throughout the year.

Campaign-level negative keyword lists complete global rollout

The negative keyword lists feature, which began rolling out in January 2025, now allows all advertisers to apply negative keywords across multiple Performance Max campaigns simultaneously. According to the documentation, "Campaign-level negative keywords rolling out to all advertisers" marked a significant milestone in the year's development program. According to the documentation, "If there are search terms that give you unwanted impressions or clicks across multiple campaigns, you can create a negative keyword list that includes those terms, then apply the list to relevant campaigns."

Advertisers can now add up to 5,000 negative keywords per list and create up to 20 negative keyword lists per account. The feature includes support for broad, exact, and phrase match types. Account-level negative keywords automatically apply to all search and shopping inventory within relevant campaign types, creating a global exclusion system.

For retailers specifically, brand exclusions reached full functionality with format-specific controls. "Brand exclusions for different formats in retailer campaigns with product feeds" completed deployment, allowing different exclusion rules for Search text ads versus Shopping ads.

Search themes reach maximum capacity with expanded limits

Google finalized the search themes expansion that doubled limits from 25 to 50 per asset group during 2025. The completed implementation includes the "search themes usefulness indicator" that shows whether themes drive incremental traffic beyond Performance Max's automated discovery capabilities. According to the announcement, search themes "let you indicate queries that you know your customers are looking for" and are "optional and additive to the queries and placements Performance Max predicts will perform well based on your assets, feeds and landing pages."

Search terms reporting completed its rollout across all Performance Max campaigns throughout 2025, providing full transparency into user queries triggering ads. The "search terms insights source column" now reveals whether queries originate from Performance Max's keywordless targeting or from advertiser-provided search themes, completing the visibility improvements that began in early 2025. "The search terms report helps you discover the search terms that triggered your Performance Max ads, providing insights into user search behaviour and its impact on your campaigns," according to the documentation.

Demographic and device targeting controls reach full deployment

The year concluded with complete rollout of age-based demographic exclusions and device targeting capabilities. "Demographic exclusions" and "Device targeting" moved from beta testing to general availability, allowing advertisers to exclude specific age brackets and customize targeting for computer, mobile, or tablet traffic. The completed "URL contains" rules for campaigns with product feeds enable targeting based on specific page categories within websites. The feature expansion throughout 2025 brought parity between standard Performance Max campaigns and those using product feeds.

Customer acquisition reporting reaches maturity

The "new customer acquisition goal with high value mode" completed its transition from beta to full availability during 2025. The system now successfully identifies and targets high-value prospects through Customer Match integration, with Google AI predicting which new users are likely to maximize lifetime value. The reporting improvements eliminated the persistent "Unknown" conversion classifications that plagued earlier implementations. According to the final documentation, "Now, you won't see these 'Unknown' conversions in reporting because we've improved our ability to estimate whether an 'Unknown' customer is a new or existing customer."

Asset reporting and creative tools reach full capability

The year concluded with comprehensive asset-level metrics providing detailed performance statistics across all creative elements. The "ability to segment and download asset group performance" completed its rollout, enabling granular analysis of conversions, conversion value, impressions, clicks, and costs across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Creative recommendations reached full integration with Google's AI-powered image editor throughout 2025. The "new creative recommendations for channel performance" provide specific improvement suggestions with direct links to editing tools, streamlining the optimization process that previously required multiple platforms.

Final URL expansion reporting completes transparency initiative

The "Final URL expansion assets reporting" feature concluded its deployment, providing complete visibility into automatically generated assets. Advertisers gained full control over text customization and final URL expansion assets, with removal capabilities for unwanted automated creations. The URL exclusion capabilities reached full functionality, enabling rules-based systems to prevent traffic from reaching inappropriate website sections. This completed the automation oversight features that began development in early 2025.

Implementation completed across all eligible accounts

The 2025 rollout reached all eligible advertisers by August, completing the year-long deployment program. Account eligibility requirements remained consistent throughout the year, requiring active status, 30-day advertising history, policy compliance, and exclusions for sensitive verticals such as election advertising.

The AI-powered image editor completed its language expansion, supporting prompts in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, and Japanese. All generated images include SynthID watermarking and open-standard markup for identification, addressing intellectual property and transparency concerns throughout the development cycle.

Year concludes with significant adoption milestones

Performance Max concluded 2025 with over one million active advertisers, representing substantial growth from its 2022 launch. Google's year-end data showed that the 90+ quality improvements implemented in 2024 continued driving results, with conversions and conversion value increasing by over 10% for participating advertisers.

The competitive landscape intensified during 2025, with Microsoft Ads launching Performance Max updates including LinkedIn integration for professional targeting data. This competitive pressure accelerated Google's feature development timeline throughout the year.

For the marketing community, 2025 represented a maturation phase for automated advertising platforms. PPC Land reported analysis throughout the year documented the shift toward greater transparency and control in automated systems, with Performance Max serving as the primary testing ground for balancing automation efficiency with advertiser oversight requirements.

Timeline

• January 20, 2025: Google begins requiring brand guidelines for new Performance Max campaigns created through UI
• January 23, 2025: Google announces 2025 Performance Max roadmap including campaign-level negative keywords and demographic controls
• March 11, 2025: Google raises Performance Max negative keywords limit to 10,000 across all campaigns
• April 30, 2025: Google announces major transparency boost including channel-level performance reporting and full search terms visibility
• July 14, 2025: Google completes brand guidelines rollout for all UI campaigns with automatic migration by October 30
• August 7, 2025: Google concludes 2025 Performance Max feature deployment with final rollout of enhanced controls and reporting capabilities

Key Terms Explained

Performance Max: Google's automated campaign type that leverages artificial intelligence to optimize ad placement across all Google properties including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps. Performance Max represents Google's flagship automated advertising solution, designed to maximize performance while requiring minimal manual management from advertisers.

Negative keywords: Terms that prevent ads from showing when users search for specific queries. These exclusions help advertisers avoid irrelevant traffic and maintain brand suitability. The feature now extends to Performance Max campaigns through both individual campaign additions and shared negative keyword lists that can be applied across multiple campaigns simultaneously.

Search themes: Optional targeting signals that allow advertisers to indicate specific queries they know their customers use when searching for their products or services. Search themes work additively with Performance Max's automated targeting, helping guide the AI toward relevant audiences while maintaining the platform's predictive capabilities for discovering new opportunities.

Asset groups: Organizational units within Performance Max campaigns that contain related creative assets, landing pages, and targeting signals. Asset groups function as the primary building blocks for Performance Max campaigns, replacing traditional ad groups and enabling Google's AI to mix and match creative elements across different placements and audiences.

Customer acquisition: The process of identifying and targeting new customers who have not previously made purchases from a business. Google's enhanced customer acquisition features now include high-value mode, which uses machine learning to predict which prospects are likely to become valuable long-term customers based on existing customer data patterns.

AI-powered image editor: Google's artificial intelligence tool for creating and modifying advertising images directly within the Google Ads platform. The editor enables advertisers to generate new images from text prompts, replace backgrounds, adjust colors, and create multiple aspect ratios, streamlining the creative development process for multi-channel campaigns.

Final URL expansion: An automated feature that allows Performance Max campaigns to direct users to more relevant landing pages within the same domain based on their search intent. This capability extends beyond the originally specified landing page to find better-matching content on the advertiser's website, potentially improving user experience and conversion rates.

Demographic targeting: Audience segmentation based on characteristics such as age, gender, and other demographic factors. The new demographic exclusions for Performance Max enable advertisers to prevent their ads from showing to specific age groups, providing greater control over audience reach while maintaining automated optimization capabilities.

Campaign-level controls: Management features that operate at the campaign level rather than at more granular levels like ad groups or keywords. These controls enable advertisers to set broad parameters and exclusions that apply across entire Performance Max campaigns, simplifying management while providing strategic oversight of automated advertising activities.

Asset-level metrics: Performance data that shows how individual creative assets perform within automated campaigns. These metrics include conversions, clicks, impressions, and costs attributed to specific images, headlines, descriptions, and other creative elements, enabling advertisers to identify which assets drive the strongest results across different channels and placements.

Summary

Who: Google Ads announced the updates, affecting over one million advertisers currently using Performance Max campaigns.

What: Completion of 2025 Performance Max enhancement program including campaign-level negative keyword lists, search theme expansion to 50 per asset group, demographic and device targeting controls, mature customer acquisition reporting, and comprehensive asset-level metrics.

When: The final deployment concluded on August 7, 2025, completing a year-long rollout program that began in January 2025.

Where: The updates apply to Performance Max campaigns across Google's advertising network including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps properties.

Why: The year-long program addressed persistent advertiser requests for greater control and visibility in automated campaigns while maintaining AI-driven optimization benefits, concluding Google's systematic response to industry concerns about "black box" campaign management and brand safety requirements that emerged during Performance Max's early adoption phase.