Of all the campaign types in Google Ads, Performance Max asks the least of you and decides the most. Hand it a conversion goal, a budget and a folder of text, images and video, and Google chooses where every dollar goes, from search results to YouTube to Gmail. For an online store with thousands of sales a month, that can work remarkably well. For a software company, everything depends on one question: what is the campaign learning from?
Performance Max chases whatever the account counts as a conversion. If that's a free-trial sign-up, it finds more sign-ups, from wherever sign-ups are cheapest. If it's a qualified lead confirmed in the CRM, it has something worth finding. This chapter covers when a software account should add Performance Max, how to keep it from taking over the searches you've already won and which defaults to change before it spends anything.
A Trial Sign-Up Is Not a Qualified Lead. Google's Own Lead-Gen Advice Points Performance Max at the Qualified Lead.
Google publishes a best-practices page for running Performance Max on lead generation, and its advice lines up with everything Chapter 1 set up. It lists "Qualified Lead" among the lead-gen goals to choose from, and tells advertisers to "Optimize to deeper funnel conversion actions where possible." It also warns against bidding on several stages of the funnel inside one strategy and recommends picking one.
For a software account, that means Performance Max should bid on one stage: the qualified lead, or a held demo, that the CRM sends back to Google Ads. Not the trial sign-up, not the demo request form, and not both at once.
Our rule adds a volume gate. We add Performance Max once about 30 qualified leads a month hold steady with both Search campaigns from Chapter 6 running, Isolation and Exploration. For most software accounts, that's around months six to seven, and sooner for bigger ones. For a sales-led product with a long sales cycle and a narrow market, it may be never, and that's fine. The Search campaigns from Chapters 5 through 7 can carry a sales-led account on their own.
When it does launch, expect a learning period. Google's setup page says it's "typically 1-2 weeks, but sometimes up to 6 weeks." Judge it after that, not during.
Performance Max Shows Ads on YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps Too. Bots Fill Out a Free-Trial Form There as Easily as Buyers.
Search shows ads to people who typed a search. Performance Max also shows them on YouTube, on Display sites and apps, in Gmail, in Discover and in Maps. Some of that inventory is excellent. Some of it is where junk traffic comes from.
One lead-gen advertiser on Reddit described running Performance Max for about four months before "we started getting hit hard with spam leads with fake emails clicking on our ads and submitting lead info." Most of it was marked "other," not from the categories they'd approved. The replies were consistent. Check whether each junk lead carries a Google click ID, since no click ID means the spam didn't come from an ad. Pull the placements report and exclude the junk sites. And count only the leads the CRM confirms: "On my clients lead gen accounts only CRM-validated leads count as primary," one practitioner wrote.
A free-trial form is about the easiest conversion on the internet to fake. It asks for an email and maybe a name, and many trials need no credit card. If raw sign-ups are the conversion, a bot that fills out the form looks exactly like a customer to Performance Max, and the campaign will happily buy more of it. If the conversion is a qualified lead that a person on your sales team confirmed, the bot never counts.
Budget matters too. One software operator put it bluntly: "At less than $1000 there's not much you can do anyways - Remarketing, PMax is ruled out anyways." On a small budget, every dollar Performance Max spends exploring YouTube and Display is a dollar the proven search keywords didn't get.
Google Hands a Search to Your Exact Match Campaign Before Performance Max Gets It. Fund the Exact Match Campaign First.
Software founders often ask whether Performance Max steals the searches their exact match campaign has already proven. Mostly it can't. Type "crm for small business" when Isolation holds that exact keyword, and Google's overview page says Isolation's ad is the one that runs.
The same page carries a catch. Its fine print: an Isolation campaign that's capped by its daily budget can now and then see Performance Max show up on the very keywords it holds. For a software account, that means Isolation's daily budget is the lock on its best searches.
So before launching Performance Max, check Isolation's lost impression share due to budget (Chapter 7). If it's losing searches to budget, fix that first. Otherwise Performance Max can pick up some of your best searches once the budget runs out, report them as its own wins and look better than it is.
Search themes, the keyword-like hints you can give Performance Max, don't change this. They rank with phrase and broad match keywords in Google's pecking order, which puts them behind an exact match keyword.
Nearly Two-Thirds of the Pages on 12 Software Sites Were Blog Posts and Help Articles. Final URL Expansion Can Send Ad Clicks There.
Performance Max doesn't have to send clicks to the page you chose. Its final URL expansion setting lets Google pick a different page on your site if it thinks that page fits the search better, and Google's help page says, "Final URL expansion is turned on by default for Performance Max campaigns."
On a software site, the page Google picks is often not a page built to sell. We counted every page in the sitemaps of the twelve sample software companies from earlier chapters: 16,332 pages in all.
- Blog posts and articles: about 55%.
- Help and support pages: about 8%.
- Pages built to sell, meaning pricing, product, feature, industry, comparison pages and home pages: about 14%.
- Free tools, templates, case studies, careers and pages we couldn't classify made up the rest.
A blog post about project management theory might match a search well. It's still a page for readers, not buyers, and a paid click that lands there rarely starts a trial. Google's own lead-gen page suggests switching the setting off if ads land on irrelevant pages of your own site.
Two ways to handle it. The simple one: switch the setting off for the first months, and the campaign can only use the landing pages you listed. The other: leave it on and exclude whole sections by URL rule, such as anything containing /blog or /help, so Google can only choose among your selling pages. In both cases, write the landing pages from Chapter 4 first.
Performance Max Will Bid on Your Own Brand Name Unless You Exclude It. The Brand Campaign Already Owns Those Searches.
Nothing in a new Performance Max campaign stops it from bidding when someone types your product's name. Brand searches usually convert well and cost less than category searches, which is exactly why Performance Max likes them: they make its numbers look great without finding a single new customer.
Google's brand exclusions fix this. Its help page says to "Use brand exclusions to prevent your Performance Max campaign from serving on specific brand searches, such as your own or a competitor's." Add your brand to the exclusion list before launch. Searches for your name belong in your brand campaign, where you control the ads, the bids and the reporting.
Software brands have an extra reason. On 11 of the 12 sample sites, the login link points to a separate address, and login searches made up a large share of the brand searches in our Keyword Planner pulls. Customers looking for the login page aren't new business. Chapter 12 covers how the brand campaign handles them. Performance Max shouldn't be paying for them at all.
Campaign-level negative keywords are available in Performance Max as well, though they only filter search and Shopping placements, not YouTube or Display. Add the same junk negatives from Chapter 5: jobs, stock, certification and free-template searches.
Google Makes a Video for Your Ads if You Don't Upload One. A Two-Minute Screen Recording of the Product Beats It.
Performance Max needs video for YouTube. If you don't supply any, Google supplies its own: "If you don't add a video to your Performance Max asset group, then one or more videos may be auto-generated from the assets in your asset group." For a software company, an auto-generated slideshow of stock-looking images and headlines says nothing about the product.
Pass on the generated text and images, too. Move Isolation's best-performing headlines into the asset group, and use real product screenshots instead of stock photos.
For video, you already have better material. A two-minute screen recording of the product doing the job buyers search for, scheduling a week of shifts or moving a deal through a pipeline, is the most convincing software video there is. Add a voiceover from someone on the team, and upload it so Google doesn't make one.
Then give the campaign two kinds of hints:
- Search themes. Google allows up to 25 per asset group. Take them from Isolation's proven searches, the ones that already bring qualified leads, not from a brainstorm.
- Audience signals. Custom segments built from searches your buyers type and from competitor websites they visit. Google treats them as hints, not fences, and its signals page says the campaign may reach people outside them when it predicts they'll convert.
Google also offers a new-customer goal that works with lead generation. It needs a customer list with at least 100 active members, and in new-customers-only mode Google suggests reaching existing customers through a separate campaign. Upload the same customer list from Chapter 9 so Performance Max can tell new buyers from current ones.
Next: Google Can Aim Demand Gen at Company Size, Not Job Title. Build Software Audiences From Rivals and Searches.
Performance Max decides on its own who sees your ads. Demand Gen gives you more say over the audience, on YouTube, Discover and Gmail. Chapter 11 covers what Google can and can't target for a software company.
Every chapter, from tracking to brand campaigns, competitor campaigns and the rules for free trials, is on the guide's home page. Chapter 9 covers the launch settings to apply to Performance Max too.
For software clients in our Google Ads management work, we hold Performance Max back until the CRM has confirmed a few months of qualified leads, and we add the product's name to its brand exclusions on day one. If your account already runs Performance Max, open its brand exclusions today and check whether your own name is on the list.
