Performance Max is Google's all-in-one campaign. A single budget runs across search results, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, the Discover feed and partner websites. A cleaning company supplies the words, the pictures and one instruction about what success looks like; Google's system picks the placement for each impression.
That instruction is your conversions. Performance Max has no keywords to lean on and no list of searches you chose. Everything it decides, it decides by looking at what you counted as a result and going to find more of it. Count real quote requests, qualified calls and booked cleans, and it hunts for people who do those things. Count page views or taps on a text button, and it hunts for people who browse and tap.
So the work for this chapter mostly happened in Chapter 1. This is where it pays off, or doesn't.
Performance Max Chases the Same Quote Requests, Calls and Bookings as Your Search Campaigns
Performance Max doesn't need its own special goal. It uses the conversions your account already counts as primary, the same ones Isolation and Exploration have been learning from for months:
- Quote requests from the forms and booking tools on your service pages.
- Calls that pass Google's check or last 30 seconds, from the ads and from the forwarding number on your site.
- Booked cleans, sent back to Google Ads by click ID from your scheduling software (Chapter 1).
Bid for the number of those conversions, not a dollar value on each. It's the same approach the Search campaigns use, and it keeps every campaign in the account learning from one definition of a good result.
Volume is what makes this work. Performance Max learns from every conversion it sees, so the more real ones you feed it, the faster it figures out who books a cleaner in your area. That's exactly why the quote requests stay in. They're the most common way a cleaning customer raises a hand, and a campaign trained on bookings alone would have far fewer examples to learn from.
Before launch, open the conversion list one more time and make sure nothing junk is still counting as primary:
- Page views and button taps stay secondary. A tap on "Text us" means someone opened their messages, not that they sent one.
- Careers page actions never count. Job seekers fill out forms too, and a campaign that counts them will go find more job seekers.
- Duplicate call counting from two tools gets fixed, or Performance Max learns from each call twice.
Office cleaning works the same way. If you sell commercial contracts, a facility manager's quote request is a primary conversion like any other, and the office asset group later in this chapter keeps those people pointed at the office page instead of the house cleaning one. Fewer of them arrive, but each one is worth a steady monthly contract.
If the conversion list is clean, Performance Max starts with the right picture of your customer. If it isn't, no setting later in this chapter can fix that.
Performance Max Waits for About 30 Quality Conversions a Month, Because It Learns From Bookings You Already Have
A new cleaning account doesn't start with Performance Max. It starts with Isolation, our name for exact match keywords bid by hand (Chapter 6), and adds Exploration, our broad match campaign, once there's data. Performance Max comes after both.
The gate is volume, not the calendar. When the two Search campaigns together hold at about 30 quality conversions a month, month after month, the account has shown what a real customer looks like, and Performance Max has something to learn from. For most cleaning companies that's around the sixth or seventh month. Companies spending more get there sooner.
Start the campaign on Maximize Conversions and leave the cost-per-conversion target blank. A cleaning account's first few weeks of Performance Max are for learning which households request quotes, call and book; once there's a real average cost per conversion, set the target near it.
One worry owners have: will Performance Max steal the searches Isolation already wins? Mostly not. Google says a Search campaign's exact match keyword gets served ahead of Performance Max when a search matches it, unless the Search campaign has run out of budget. So "house cleaning near me" in your exact match list stays with Isolation, at the bid you chose. Performance Max works the searches and places you haven't claimed.
Then judge it on the same number as everything else. After six to eight weeks, put Performance Max's cost per conversion next to Isolation's and Exploration's, and check how many of its quote requests turned into booked cleans. If it's higher for a month running, trim its budget instead of adding to it. And watch the account's total booked cleans, not just the number beside Performance Max. A campaign that runs on your brand name, your regulars and your best searches can look brilliant while the business books no more cleans than before. The exclusions in the next section are what keep that from happening.
Your Customer List Tells Performance Max Which Households Are Already Yours
A cleaning company's recurring customers are its most valuable asset. They're also the last people you should pay Google to find again. They already book you every two weeks.
Left alone, Performance Max can't tell them apart from new prospects. A regular who searches your name to reschedule, or clicks an ad on YouTube, looks like a conversion-ready person. So give Google the list.
- Upload your customer list. Name, email and phone from your scheduling software, uploaded as a Customer Match list. Google needs at least 100 people on it who've been added or updated within the last 540 days.
- Switch on New Customer Only. It's one of Google's customer lifecycle goals, and it works with Maximize Conversions. Google uses your list and your site tag to recognize existing customers, and the campaign bids only for people who aren't on it.
- Exclude your own name. Your brand already has its own campaign (Chapter 5). Google recommends brand exclusions in Performance Max when brand is handled separately, so add your company name there and keep those cheap, loyal searches where they belong.
- Location stays on Presence. The same setting from Chapter 9: people in your service area, not people curious about it.
Performance Max Takes Hints, Not Orders. The Conversion Goal Does the Steering.
Performance Max asks for audience signals, which sound like targeting but aren't. Google's own help page says they're suggestions, and that the campaign may show ads to people outside them when it predicts a conversion. Think of them as directions to the neighborhood, not a gate around it.
The most useful signals for a cleaning company come from what you already know works:
- A custom segment built from your best searches. Take the searches that produced booked cleans in Isolation and Exploration and enter them as a custom segment. Google uses them to recognize people with the same intent.
- Competitor websites in the same segment. The national franchises and the local companies from Chapter 5. People who visit those sites are shopping for a cleaner.
- Your customer list as a signal. It shows Google what your good customers look like, while New Customer Only keeps it from bidding on the actual people.
Search themes work the same way on the search side. Add the phrases that booked in Exploration, not a brainstorm. They tell Performance Max which searches you care about, and your exact match keywords still keep priority on the searches you've claimed.
None of this is the steering wheel. The goal from the first section is. Signals help Performance Max start closer to the right people. The conversion you count decides where it ends up.
Photos of Your Actual Crew Beat Anything Google Generates for an Asset Group
Performance Max builds its ads from asset groups: bundles of headlines, descriptions, photos and video that each point to a single page on your site. Build one per service, the same way Chapter 4 built one page per service:
- Recurring cleaning, pointed at the recurring page, with headlines about the same cleaner every visit and never coming home to a mess.
- Move-out and move-in, pointed at the move-out page, with the deposit-back angle.
- Office cleaning, if you sell it, as its own group with its own page and its own tone.
Start the headlines from what already works. Chapter 8's Search ads have been running for months by now, and the lines that earned clicks and bookings move straight in. Leave Google's text generator off here too, for the same reasons Chapter 9 switched it off in Search.
Then the pictures. Cleaning is a trust purchase from strangers who'll be alone in your house, and stock photos of a smiling model with a spray bottle tell a customer nothing. Your own photos do: a real crew in your shirts, a real kitchen after a deep clean, the before and after of a move-out. Phone photos in good light are fine.
Video matters more than most owners expect. Skip it and Google assembles its own clip out of your photos and text, a feature that starts switched on. A 20-second phone video of your crew arriving at a house and walking through a finished kitchen beats anything assembled from stock frames.
Last, the landing pages. The page-swapping feature from Chapter 9 shows up here as well, switched on from the start, free to send a searcher somewhere other than the page you picked. Switch it off, or at least exclude your careers page, so a searcher looking for a cleaner doesn't land on a job application.
Next: Demand Gen Reaches the People Moving Into Your Service Area
Performance Max finds people already close to hiring a cleaner. Chapter 11 goes earlier, to Demand Gen, Google's campaign for YouTube, Discover and Gmail, and to the one group of future cleaning customers you can see coming: people moving into your area.
Earlier chapters: counting every call, text and booking, where cleaning customers search, what a recurring customer is worth, one page per service, competitor keywords, known searches before broad match, bidding each service by hand, ads in your customers' words and the settings to switch off. All sixteen are on the guide's home page.
In our Google Ads management for cleaning companies, Performance Max learns from the same clean conversion list as every Search campaign, and the regulars already on the schedule stay off its list.
