A facilities director has narrowed a medical office project to two builders, both recommended by the architect. She searches one builder's name to find its phone number. If that builder runs Performance Max with no brand exclusion, the campaign can show her an ad, collect the click and report the call as one of its conversions.
The builder pays for an owner it already had. Worse, Performance Max now believes it found her.
This chapter covers what Performance Max is, when a commercial builder is ready for it, why a builder's own name is the first thing to protect, and the settings that keep it pointed at owners who haven't chosen yet. It follows Chapter 9, which set up the location and launch settings.
Performance Max Spends Across Six Google Channels at Once, So It Needs About 30 Inquiries a Month to Learn From
A builder's Search campaigns show text ads on Google's results page and nowhere else. Performance Max is a different animal. From a single campaign, its ads can appear on Google Search, on YouTube, on the Display Network, in the Discover feed on phones, inside Gmail and on Google Maps, according to Google's overview of the campaign type. You hand it photos, headlines, videos and a goal; Google decides which piece runs where and what to bid.
That reach is also why it waits. Performance Max decides where to spend by watching which placements lead to conversions. A commercial builder logging a handful of project inquiries a month gives it almost nothing to watch, so it spends on guesses across six channels at once.
We hold Performance Max until an account reaches about 30 good conversions a month: real project inquiries, not job applications or subcontractor forms (Chapter 1 set those apart). For accounts that get there, that's typically six or seven months in, after Isolation and Exploration (Chapters 6 and 7) have shown which searches produce owners. Many single-market commercial builders take longer, and some never need it. A builder winning plenty of work from Search alone has no reason to hurry.
Owners Who Search a Builder's Name Have Usually Already Chosen. Performance Max Can Still Bid on Them.
Chapter 5 found that in the example market, Cincinnati, the names of 14 builders active there drew about 3,040 searches a month, counting each firm once. The 18 searches that clearly mean commercial construction drew about 370. The biggest single name drew about 880.
Not every name search is an owner; Chapter 5 showed job seekers and suppliers type builders' names too. But many of those searchers have been told about you by an architect, a broker or a past client, and are looking for your phone number or website. They click readily, and plenty of them call.
That's exactly the kind of result Performance Max is built to find. Left alone, it can serve on searches for your own name, take credit for the inquiries those owners send, and look like a strong campaign while adding very little. The report says Performance Max produced the call. The owner likely would have called anyway.
This matters more for builders than for most businesses, because so much of commercial construction runs on referrals. In the example market, name searches outnumbered the commercial category searches about eight to one. A campaign that can quietly collect that traffic can look good on paper while teaching the account nothing about new owners.
Google's Brand Exclusion List Pulls Performance Max Off Your Name and Leaves Those Searches to Your Brand Campaign
A builder doesn't have to police this by hand. Google offers a setting called brand exclusions, and the help page for it describes it as the strongest tool Google has for keeping ads off a brand's searches. A brand exclusion stops the campaign from showing on searches for the brand, its usual misspellings and related subsidiary brands, which is wider than a negative keyword list a builder would type by hand. Inside a Performance Max campaign, the exclusions apply to its Search and Shopping ads. The page recommends exactly the arrangement this guide builds: when a separate campaign already handles people typing the company's name, the builder lists that name in Performance Max's exclusions, and one owner never costs two campaigns' worth of credit.
That separate campaign already exists. Chapter 5 set up a brand campaign with your company name in exact match, and Google adds a rule that works in its favor. Google's overview of the campaign type says a search that lands squarely on an exact match keyword is served by the Search campaign holding that keyword before Performance Max gets a turn. So a search for your exact company name is prioritized to the brand campaign, and the brand exclusion handles the misspellings and add-ons, like your name plus a city, that the exact keyword won't catch.
Put more than your current name on the list. Commercial builders rename, merge and spin off divisions, and owners keep searching the old names for years. One firm in the example market, The Huseman Group, used to be HGC Construction. Keyword Planner showed about 590 searches a month for the old name and about 210 for the new one. A builder in that position adds both to its brand campaign and both to Performance Max's exclusion list, along with any division names and the abbreviations people actually type.
The same list can hold rival builders' names. Google's page mentions excluding "a competitor's" brand as well as your own, and Chapter 5 already put rivals' names on the Search campaigns' negative list for the same reason: an owner who typed a specific firm's name has usually been pointed to that firm. Add the larger local names from Chapter 5's research, and Performance Max stops spending on owners who were looking for someone else.
Set it up when the Performance Max campaign is built, not after a month of inflated results. Then check the brand campaign's search terms report: the name searches should keep showing up there, and Performance Max's reported conversions may drop. That drop isn't a loss. It's the share Performance Max was taking credit for. What's left is the number worth judging: inquiries from owners who never typed a builder's name, found through YouTube, Discover or a search for the kind of building they need.
A Project Inquiry Has No Dollar Value Yet, So Value-Based Bidding Would Steer by a Number a Builder Made Up
Google's overview says Performance Max can aim for the most conversions or the most conversion value. For an online store, value is real: each sale arrives with a dollar amount. For a commercial builder, a project inquiry arrives with none. A tenant build-out inquiry might become a $200,000 job, a $4 million job or nothing. Even the builder doesn't know which until the drawings, the budget and the owner's financing come together, often months after the first call.
Chapter 3 worked out the most a builder can afford to pay for an inquiry, from past projects and win rates. That figure sets the ceiling on what an inquiry can cost. It's the wrong number to stamp on each inquiry as its value, because the bidding would then treat every inquiry as worth the same, and learn nothing true about which ones lead to big jobs.
So a builder's Performance Max campaign bids toward conversions, with a target CPA set near the account's real cost per project inquiry (Chapter 7). If, years in, the account tracks which inquiries became signed contracts and for how much, value can be revisited. Most builders aren't there, and pretending to be costs money.
Final URL Expansion Comes On by Default, and a Builder's Site Has Pages No Owner Should Land On
Two more settings decide where a Performance Max click lands and what the ads say.
The first is Final URL expansion. With it on, the click from an owner may not reach the build-out page you picked; Google can route it to whichever page of the builder's site it rates higher for that search. Google's page on the feature says it's on from the start in a new Performance Max campaign, and that every page on the site is fair game until the builder lists it as excluded. Every one of the 12 builder sites we checked in the example market had at least one page aimed at someone other than a commercial owner: careers pages, subcontractor or supplier forms, or residential pages. Add those to the campaign's URL exclusions before launch. Chapter 13 goes further into how Google's automation reads a builder's site.
The second is what you feed it. Google's overview lists auto-generated videos as an optional setting, which builds extra video from what you've uploaded. A builder is better served by its own: finished projects, a site walk, a short clip of a crew at work. The same goes for images. Use photos of buildings you finished, not stock pictures of hard hats and blueprints. An owner looking at a dental office build-out wants to see one you built.
Run on enough inquiries, kept off your name and pointed at the right pages, Performance Max can reach owners on YouTube and Discover who weren't searching yet. That's the job it's good at. If you'd like help deciding when your account is ready for it, our Google Ads agency works through this with commercial builders.
Next: Owners Often Call an Architect or Broker Before a Builder
Chapter 11 looks at Demand Gen: reaching owners on YouTube, Discover and Gmail before they search, often while they're still talking to an architect or a broker. The full chapter list is on the Google Ads for Construction Companies guide home.
