Performance Max is Google's all-in-one campaign type. A plumber or dentist who sets one up supplies a budget, a goal, and a folder of headlines, photos and video. Google then spreads the ads across its properties, from the search results and Maps to YouTube, Gmail and websites that carry its ads.
Google also offers a version built for businesses people visit, called Performance Max for store goals. It sounds like it was made for a local business. Google's own setup guidance says otherwise for most of them: the recommended minimum is five locations, and 10 for the store-visit goals the campaign is named for.
This chapter covers who store goals are really for, how a business with one location can still use Performance Max, and the four settings that keep it from undoing the work of the earlier chapters. Store goals and the lead-focused version share a name, and they aren't the same campaign; the difference decides whether a local business should use Performance Max at all. It picks up after Chapter 9, with a Search account that is already running and counting calls.
Performance Max Store Goals Come With Google's Own Minimum: Five Locations, or 10 for Store Visits.
Google describes store goals as a campaign that uses your business locations, budget and ad assets to "maximize your in-store value and conversions (using store visits, store sales, and local actions such as call clicks, or direction clicks)." The ads promote the locations across Google's properties, including Maps, with formats such as promoted pins.
Google's optimization tips for the campaign include a number that's easy to miss: "It's recommended that you have a minimum of 10 business locations in campaigns with store visits or store sales. For campaigns with local actions, it's recommended that you have a minimum of 5 business locations." Google also recommends running the campaign for at least 30 days.
For a chain that does meet those numbers, store goals have real extras. Google says store-visit tracking isn't required to launch; a campaign can optimize to local actions alone, such as calls and requests for directions. Campaigns bidding on directions can also show as promoted places on Waze, the navigation app, in the markets where Waze ads are offered.
A plumber with one shop, a dentist with one office, or a gym with one club sits well below either number. Google adds another limit for dentists and med spas: local action conversions aren't available to advertisers in sensitive healthcare categories. Google also requires a store-visits campaign to sit in an account that's already active and eligible for store visits. Put simply, store goals are built for chains. A business with one location is better served by what Performance Max offers every advertiser, a campaign aimed at leads.
A One-Location Business Can Run Performance Max for Calls and Forms Once It Books 30 Conversions a Month.
The version of Performance Max a single-location business can use is the ordinary one, optimized for the same conversions the Search account already counts: calls, booked appointments and form leads, as Chapter 1 set up.
The timing matters more than the setup. Performance Max learns from conversion history, and it spreads its budget across channels where a new local account has none. So it comes third, never first:
- Isolation runs from day one: exact match Search on manual bids, from Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.
- Exploration joins at about 30 quality conversions a month, with broad match and Smart Bidding.
- Performance Max comes after that, once the account holds that volume steadily. Months six or seven is a common pace for a local account; bigger budgets get there sooner, and some small-town businesses never do.
When the time comes, what you hand Performance Max decides what it builds. Our checklist for a local business:
- One final URL per asset group, the main service page, not the home page, so the campaign starts from the page that already converts.
- Headlines and descriptions written by Chapter 8's rule, each one something the page proves.
- Real photos: the team, the trucks, finished jobs, the office or shop. In our experience, stock photos of strangers in hard hats do a local business no favors next to a competitor's real crew.
- The Business Profile linked, so the address, phone number and hours can appear with the ads, as Chapter 12 covers.
- The call asset on the same schedule as the phones, from Chapter 9.
An account that never reaches that volume isn't missing much. Performance Max on thin data spends across YouTube, Display and Maps with little to tell it which of those clicks become customers.
When an Exact Match Search Keyword and Performance Max Both Fit a Search, Google Gives It to the Keyword.
Owners who add Performance Max often ask whether it will poach the exact searches their Search campaign already wins. Google's help page settles it: "Search campaigns containing an exact match keyword are prioritized to serve over Performance Max when a query hits an exact match keyword."
That matters for a local account because of how the earlier chapters were built. The exact match keywords from Chapter 6, both "near me" and city wordings, are the searches the business already knows book jobs, at prices it knows it can pay. When one of those searches comes in, the Search campaign keeps it. For the St. Louis plumber's starting list, that means "plumber near me," "emergency plumber near me" and "plumber st louis" stay with Search, at the bids the business set by hand.
The protection has limits. Per the same page, the search themes inside Performance Max sit at the level of phrase and broad keywords. So on the wider, unlisted searches, the Exploration campaign and Performance Max can both qualify for the same search, and Google picks one of them to show. That's one more reason the exact match list in Isolation keeps growing from the search terms report: every real search added there is a search Performance Max won't take while the Search campaign is running. That last part matters: if Search runs only during phone hours, as Chapter 9 set up, give Performance Max the same ad schedule, or it picks up those searches after hours.
Performance Max Can Pick Its Own Landing Page and Send One Town's Searcher to Another Town's Page.
Google turns on a feature called Final URL expansion by default in Performance Max. With it on, a click on a plumber's water heater ad can land on whichever page of the plumber's site Google rates the best fit, not necessarily the water heater page the plumber picked. Google's own help page adds the catch: "this can sometimes lead to ads pointing to unintended pages if not managed carefully with URL exclusions."
For a local business, the unintended pages are easy to picture. The town pages from Chapter 4 are each written for one town. The offers from Chapter 8 each sit on one page with their terms. A campaign free to choose any page can send a searcher in one suburb to the page written for another, or a coupon search to a page without the coupon.
Google's page also says how to stop it: uncheck the box during setup or in the campaign's settings. We turn Final URL expansion off for local accounts, or, if a business wants to test it, exclude the town pages, the coupon pages and anything else built for one specific search.
None of this makes Final URL expansion a bad feature for every advertiser. A site with hundreds of pages, each answering a different search, may want Google picking the closest one. Google's own FAQ backs the local choice: for a business with one page that converts, it says to turn Final URL expansion off and make sure the final URL is the exact page you want people to land on. A local business with a handful of pages, each written for one service or one town, gets little from it and risks a lot.
Performance Max Will Buy Searches for Your Own Name Unless a Brand Exclusion Stops It.
Chapter 5 gave the business's own name a campaign of its own, so those easy, high-converting searches don't make the service campaigns look better than they are. Performance Max can undo that by bidding on the same name searches and taking credit for them.
The tool for that is a brand exclusion. Google's brand exclusions page points to exactly this situation, a business that already runs its brand searches in their own campaign, as the case it recommends them for. Once the company name is on that exclusion list, Performance Max stops showing on searches for it, so its Search results reflect people who weren't already looking for the business. One catch for small businesses: the exclusion draws on Google's list of recognized brands, and a local company may not be on it. A business that isn't listed can ask Google to add its name, and can block it with a negative keyword while it waits. The numbers can be large for a local business: in Chapter 5's Keyword Planner pull, one St. Louis cleaning company's own name drew about 720 searches a month. Left unexcluded, those searches would flatter Performance Max the same way they would flatter a service campaign.
Performance Max Chases Whatever the Account Counts as a Conversion. A Booked Job Teaches It More Than a Map Click.
Performance Max optimizes toward the conversions the account tells it to count, and it's very good at finding more of whatever that is. That makes the choice of conversion the most important setting in the campaign.
Google counts several local actions, including clicks to call and clicks for directions, and recommends Target ROAS or Maximize conversion value for Performance Max campaigns that use them, with values assigned to each action. A directions click is easy for Google to generate and doesn't say whether anyone hired the business. A local account that tells Performance Max to find more directions clicks will get more directions clicks.
Our approach is to point Performance Max at the same quality conversions the Search account bids on: calls long enough to be real, booked appointments and completed forms. Jobs that actually got booked, reported back through the Chapter 1 setup, tell the campaign more than any click can. Value-based bidding comes later, once the account knows what different jobs are worth: a drain clearing against a water heater, a cleaning against a recurring plan.
Audience signals help the campaign start in the right place. In our practice, the most useful signals are a list of past customers, which shows Google what a real customer looks like, and a custom segment built from competitors' websites. Dental and medical practices should skip the customer list: patient lists raise privacy rules that a plumber's customer list doesn't.
Our plumbers guide shows the same rollout for one trade, with Performance Max aimed at plumbing leads.
Next: Google Sizes a Demand Gen Budget at 10 Times What You Pay for One Lead.
Performance Max covers the searches and placements Google chooses. Demand Gen finds a homeowner on YouTube, Discover, Gmail or a site in the Display Network, before the leak or the toothache sends them to search. Chapter 11 sets out the point at which a plumber, dentist or gym is ready for it, and how Google sizes the budget.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you'd rather have someone run it, our Google Ads management adds Performance Max to a local account only after the Search campaigns have the conversion history to aim it.
