The client every advisory firm hopes to meet this year isn't searching "financial advisor near me" yet. She's a business owner who just got a serious offer for the company she built. Or a widower going through his late wife's accounts. Or someone who inherited an IRA last month and has no idea what the rules are. Each is about to need an advisor more than ever, and none of them has typed a hiring search.
Performance Max is the campaign that can reach people like that before they search for you. But it finds them through audiences, and Google's audience catalog has a blind spot exactly where an advisor's best clients come from. It knows when someone is about to retire. It has no audience for selling a business.
Below: the month an advisory firm should switch Performance Max on, the advisor audiences Google stocks and the ones it lacks, how to assemble the missing ones from searches, and three controls that stop the campaign wandering onto pages and searches compliance never approved. Search volumes are US-wide from Keyword Planner.
Performance Max Launches Last Because It Learns From Conversions a New Account Doesn't Have
Think of Performance Max as a general contractor for Google's whole inventory. It places ads on YouTube, in Gmail, on Maps, in the Discover feed, across display sites and on search results, all from one campaign. The firm supplies the goal, the creative and a few hints about who its clients are; the placement choices are Google's.
It makes those decisions from conversion data, which is why it comes late. An advisory account with only a handful of booked meetings gives it almost nothing to study, so its early spending is close to blind. The gate is the same one that opened Exploration in Chapter 6, roughly 30 booked meetings or other quality conversions a month from Chapter 1's tracking. Performance Max also waits for the broad-match campaign to settle, so for a typical firm it arrives around months 6 or 7; firms spending more get there sooner. Set the goal to conversions, and launch without a target cost per lead. A target cost per meeting can come later, once there's a month of the campaign's own numbers behind it.
Launching it won't steal your best searches. Google says Search campaigns with an exact match keyword "are prioritized to serve over Performance Max" when a search matches that keyword. Isolation, the exact-match campaign from Chapter 6, keeps its searches. One caveat from the same page: if Isolation runs out of budget, Performance Max "may occasionally serve on exact match terms," one more reason to keep Isolation funded.
Google Can Spot Someone Retiring Soon. It Can't Spot an Inheritance, a Divorce or a Business Sale.
Google lets you hand Performance Max hints, which it calls audience signals. We pulled Google's full audience catalog through the Google Ads API to see what an advisor has to work with.
There's a fair amount. Among Google's 40 life events are Retiring Soon, Recently Retired, Starting New Job Soon, Starting a Business Soon and Last Child Moving Out Soon. In-market audiences, people Google sees researching a purchase, include Retirement Planning, Estate Planning and Investment Services. There's an Avid Investors interest audience too. Life events aren't among the targeting options Google restricts for Consumer finance, so the limits from Chapter 9 don't remove them.
Now the gaps. There's no life event for divorce, for an inheritance or the death of a spouse, for selling a business or for a windfall such as a big bonus or company stock vesting. There's no in-market audience called wealth management or financial advisors. Clients name these moments in their reviews. Of the 522 Bay Area reviews we read, 61 mention a life event, and several are exactly these: "After I sold my business, I was looking for a fiduciary financial advisor," one wrote. Another: "After a divorce, I was now responsible for managing my money without any prior experience." Google has no audience for either person.
One more thing to know about signals: they're suggestions, not fences. Google says Performance Max can reach people outside your signals when it predicts they're likely to convert. Signals point Google in a direction. Your conversion data does the steering.
Your own data can be a signal too. The firm's own client list helps in a narrower way. Uploaded from the CRM, it keeps people who already pay you out of ads meant for strangers. Google opens that exclusion use to every advertiser in good standing; using the list to target needs an account at least 90 days old with more than $50,000 spent. Because the upload shares client information with Google, the privacy rules from Chapter 1 apply, and compliance signs off first.
Custom Segments Turn "Selling My Business" Into an Audience Performance Max Can Find
Where Google has no audience, you can build one. A custom segment is a list of search terms or websites that describes your client. Google offers a setting that reaches "people who searched for any of these terms on Google properties," and its Performance Max guidance recommends search-term custom segments specifically. You can also enter websites; Google will reach people who browse sites like them, though your ads won't appear on those sites.
Build these before you build the campaign. Two segments cover the biggest gaps for most firms, and a third gap needs different handling:
- Business sale. "Selling my business" draws about 1,600 searches a month, "exit planning" about 720 and "how to sell a small business" about 260. Anyone typing those has a liquidity event coming.
- Inheritance. "Inherited IRA rules" draws about 6,600 a month, and "what to do with inheritance" about 320. The first comes from someone who already has the account and needs to decide what to do with it.
- Divorce stays in Search. "Divorce financial planning" draws about 1,900 a month, but Google lists relationship hardships among its sensitive categories. Its policy says custom segment campaigns with sensitive ads or landing pages "will not be eligible to serve" outside Display, so a divorce asset group in Performance Max may never run. Bid on those searches as keywords in Search instead, and remember Chapter 1's warning about what can't be sent back to Google as a conversion.
Add each of the two segments to its own asset group with ads and a landing page that speak to that moment. A business owner weighing an offer and a widow sorting out accounts shouldn't see the same headline. If your firm doesn't serve one of these situations well, leave that segment out.
Performance Max Can Reroute a Prospect to Your Testimonials Page Unless You Fence It Off
Here's the setting that matters most for advisors. Out of the box, a new Performance Max campaign has Final URL expansion checked. That box gives Google permission to overrule your landing page whenever its system judges some other page on the domain a closer fit. Only pages you've explicitly excluded are off limits.
For most businesses, the risk is a confused visitor. For a registered adviser, it's an ad pointing at a page nobody reviewed as an ad destination. Of the 12 advisory firms whose sites we profiled, 5 show client reviews or testimonials, and two have pages built just for them. Those pages carry their own disclosures, but they were written as website content, not as the destination for a paid ad. Market commentary posts, performance discussions and careers pages raise the same question.
You have two choices. Switch expansion off, and each click goes exactly where the asset group says. Or keep it on and list every page you don't want used: testimonials, client stories, blog and commentary, careers, the client login. We start advisory accounts with it off. A firm with a large, carefully reviewed site can test it later with a full exclusion list.
Someone Searching Your Firm's Name Already Found You. Don't Let Performance Max Take the Credit.
A person who types your firm's name has already decided to look you up. Chapter 6 gave those searches their own brand campaign. Without an exclusion, Performance Max can show up on those same searches and then claim the meeting, padding its numbers with clients who were coming anyway.
Google offers three ways to stop that: account-level negative keywords, campaign-level negatives and campaign-level brand exclusions. It recommends the brand exclusions, because they also block misspellings and versions of the name written in other alphabets, which negative keywords miss. Exclude the firm's name and the names of the advisors people search for by name.
Search themes go the other way. They let you tell Performance Max about searches you know your clients make, and Google treats them as additions to what the campaign would find on its own. A theme carries the same priority as a phrase or broad match keyword, so it doesn't outrank Isolation's exact match keywords while Isolation has budget. In the search terms insights report, a "Source" column shows whether each search came from one of your themes or from Google's own targeting.
Performance Max Builds Ads From Whatever You Upload. Upload Only What Compliance Approved.
Nobody at the firm approves each Performance Max ad, because there's no single ad to approve. Google mixes the uploaded headlines, images and clips on the fly. So give it only material that's already been approved. Move in the best-performing headlines from your Search campaigns, the ones that came through Chapter 8's compliance review. Use real photos of your advisors and your office rather than stock images of strangers shaking hands.
Supply your own video. Google's own setup page says Performance Max creates videos automatically when none are uploaded, or when its system decides one would help, and uploading your own gets priority. Any video Google assembles is advertising nobody at the firm reviewed, so give it a real one to prefer. A simple, compliance-approved video of an advisor explaining who the firm serves is enough.
Next: Demand Gen Shows Your Video Before Anyone Searches. Budget 10 Times Your Lead Cost.
Performance Max earns its place after the account has learned who signs. Chapter 11 covers Demand Gen, the campaign built to put your video in front of people on YouTube and in Google's feeds before they search, and why its budget has to be bigger than it looks.
All chapters are on the guide's home page.
When we add Performance Max to advisory accounts through Google Ads management, the custom segments and URL exclusions are built before the campaign goes live, and the brand exclusions are in place on day one. If your Performance Max campaign is reporting suspiciously good results, check whether it's been buying your firm's name.
