Performance Max is the campaign type Google promotes hardest. A single Performance Max campaign can place a school's ads on YouTube, Gmail, Maps and Discover as well as Search and Display, and Google picks who sees them, which assets they see and, unless told otherwise, which page of the school's site they reach. For a school, that last part deserves the most attention: a school website holds far more than admissions, and Performance Max can use all of it.
This chapter covers when Performance Max belongs in a school's account, the pages to exclude before it launches, what audience signals can and can't do, and why the school's own name should stay out of it.
Performance Max Chases the Cheapest Conversion It Can Find. A School Without Months of Real Inquiries Gives It Nothing Good to Chase.
Performance Max learns from whatever the account counts as a conversion, and it gets very good at producing more of it. Practitioners who recruit for schools are mostly wary of it for exactly that reason:
- A K-12 marketing agency called Demand Gen and Performance Max "a huge money suck" for private schools.
- An agency writing about trade schools put it this way: "Performance Max is very good at finding the cheapest action that counts as a conversion."
- EducationDynamics, a large education marketing company, has written that it has "seen performance max campaigns generate up to 20% spam lead inquiries." That's their claim; we haven't verified it.
The success story we found makes the point. A university business school's in-house marketer described Performance Max and Demand Gen as his biggest Google drivers, but only after the school fed its own enrollment data back into the account.
We hold the same line. Reviewing a prospective client's account, we put it bluntly: "I would never start an account with Performance Max ever... you want to really seed your account with quality conversions first." In another account review, we warned that Performance Max could "get crazy with... spammy form submissions... or even spammy phone calls," and our answer is qualifying questions on the inquiry form and the 30-second call threshold from Chapter 1.
Budget matters too. AiMS, which makes admissions software for private schools, said in a webinar that Performance Max works well but to expect to need about $2,000 a month, run side by side with Search rather than in place of it. In our view, a school spending a few hundred dollars a month on Search will usually get more from widening Exploration than from adding Performance Max.
So Performance Max comes late. In our rollout it usually joins around months 6-7, once Isolation and Exploration are both running and the account holds steady at about 30 quality inquiries a month. Bigger schools with bigger budgets get there sooner. By then, the conversion it learns from is the inquiry admissions actually wants (Chapter 7), not a page view or a button click.
Final URL Expansion Is On by Default. It Can Send a Family to a College's Patient Portal or Job Listings.
Final URL expansion is on from the day a school creates the campaign, and until pages are excluded, Google is free to land a parent on whichever school page it judges more relevant to the search. Google's own page concedes the feature can point ads at pages the advertiser never meant to use when exclusions aren't kept up.
To see what that means for a school, we pulled the public sitemaps of our twelve example schools in the Salt Lake City market, the lists of pages each site hands to search engines. Eleven of the twelve were readable, from 38 pages at a CDL school to more than 3,800 at an online university. Among the pages they listed:
- A community college: its health center's medical clinic page, a patient portal page and several pages about working at the college: benefits, a pay calculator and student jobs.
- An independent K-12 school: athletics pages for the booster club and the coaches.
- A beauty school: blog posts written for salon clients, like a post on getting your hair done at the school's student salon.
Blogs and news make up much of some sites. At the online university, 2,150 of the 3,847 pages in its sitemap were blog or news posts, and at the Christian school, 222 of 256. Some posts are written to recruit, like a post on jobs after military service at a school that enrolls veterans. Many aren't, like a list of snacks for studying. With final URL expansion on, Google can choose either one as the landing page for an ad.
None of the pages in that first list is where a family deciding on a school should land. In Chapter 5, Keyword Planner read a public university's whole site as 724 medical searches from its health system; Performance Max reads the same site.
Before launch, build the exclusion list. Google's page tells advertisers to exclude "non-commercial sections of your website," and for schools those sections are easy to name:
- Student and parent portals, logins, the learning platform and the calendar.
- Jobs, careers at the school and human resources.
- Sports teams, booster clubs and game tickets.
- Giving, alumni and the foundation.
- News, blogs and events, unless a post is built to recruit.
- Any public service the school sells: a medical or dental clinic, a salon floor, a spa, a theater box office.
- Policies, handbooks and consumer disclosures.
In the campaign, the setting sits under text customization: choose to exclude some URLs and add the pages, or use the rules option to exclude a whole section of the site, such as everything under the jobs or athletics folder. The rules catch new pages as the site grows, which a list of single pages won't.
Performance Max also needs the school's own pictures. Each asset group is, in Google's words, a collection of "creative assets, like images, text, logos, and videos, centered on a specific theme." Build one asset group per program or school level, with that program's page as the final URL, real photos of that program's classrooms, shops or clinical labs, and headlines in families' words (Chapter 8). A school that skips video can switch on Google's auto-generated videos instead. A real walkthrough filmed on campus is better, and Chapter 11 covers making one.
Audience Signals Are Suggestions Google Can Ignore. A School's Best Signal Is Its Own List of Families Who Inquired.
Audience signals are the other major input. Google describes them as "audience suggestions that help Google AI optimize," and its help page adds a note schools should read twice: the campaign can still show ads to people outside the signals whenever Google judges them likely to convert. A signal points Google in a direction; it doesn't fence anyone in or out.
The strongest signal a school has is its own data:
- Website visitors who reached the inquiry or tour page, collected by the Google tag (Chapter 1).
- Families who inquired or enrolled, uploaded as a customer list. Google's Customer Match rules limit what newer and smaller school accounts can do with a customer list, so check the account's eligibility before building the signal around one.
Google also requires a list to keep at least 100 members added or updated within the last 540 days to stay eligible, so a small school should upload all its inquiries from the past year or two, not just this month's.
Upload parents' contact details only. Google's policy bars uploading information about anyone under 13, and in our view a K-12 school's student records have no place in an ad account at all.
Beyond the school's own lists, add the parent segment that fits the school from Chapter 9, such as Parents of Grade-Schoolers or Parents of Teens, and the program searches that already bring inquiries in Search as search themes. A search theme ranks level with a broad or phrase keyword, which means a program search that matches an Isolation keyword word for word still goes to Isolation.
Searches for a School's Own Name Belong in a Brand Campaign. Inside Performance Max, They Inflate the Results.
Families who search for a school by name were coming anyway. When Performance Max bids on the school's name, it books those families as its own wins, then reports a cost per inquiry no new-family campaign could match.
Google offers brand exclusions for Performance Max. Create a brand list for the school, requesting the brand if Google doesn't list it yet, and add abbreviations and campus nicknames as negative keywords. Google describes brand exclusions as the recommended approach when brand traffic runs in a separate campaign.
We've seen what mixing does to the numbers. Reviewing an education account's reporting, we told the school that if its brand searches were combined with everything else, "your number would look a lot better, but artificially better." Separate them, and each campaign's cost per inquiry means something.
The Performance Max help page now lists brand exclusions and negative keywords together, as a way to "prevent overlaps and block unwanted queries." Add the negatives from Chapter 5 that the Search campaigns already use, so the job searches, portal logins and salon bookings Search already blocks stay blocked here.
The brand campaign from Chapter 6 keeps running beside it on its own budget, which keeps a parent who types the school's name out of Performance Max's numbers entirely.
Then judge Performance Max on what admissions confirms, not on its own conversion column. If admissions can't find its inquiries in the enrollment records, or calls them and reaches people who never meant to inquire, cut its budget before it learns any further from them.
Next: A Campus Tour Families Can Watch at Home
Chapter 11 covers video: a real campus tour as a YouTube ad, shown through Demand Gen to the parents of teens. If your launch settings aren't done yet, Chapter 9 covers them. All sixteen chapters are listed on the Google Ads for Education guide home. If you'd like a hand with Performance Max, here is how our Google Ads management runs for schools.
