Up to now, a restoration company running this guide's campaigns has held the reins. The water damage keywords were typed in by hand. The mold searches went to the mold page and the fire searches to the fire page, because someone chose those pairings in Chapter 4.
Performance Max hands most of those decisions to Google. It picks where the ad shows across all of Google's properties, which words and images to combine, and, unless you stop it, which page on your site the click lands on. For a restoration company with a blog full of drying tips, a careers page and a payment page, that last choice matters more than it sounds.
That doesn't rule Performance Max out for a restorer. It just puts it near the end of the line. It needs a steady record of booked jobs to aim at, and a set of fences you build before you switch it on.
Performance Max Buys Search, YouTube, Maps and More From One Budget. It Learns From the Water Damage Jobs You Report Back.
Google's overview lists six places a single Performance Max budget can reach: Search, Maps, YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. For a restorer, that means the same dollars might buy a click from a homeowner searching "flooded basement" or a view from someone watching a home repair video. The restorer supplies the money, the target and the raw material: headlines, photos of the crew, a video if there is one. Google handles the placement.
The goal is the steering wheel. Performance Max spends toward whatever your account counts as a conversion, so the booked-job tracking from Chapter 1 has to be in place and trusted before it starts. Point it at raw calls and it will happily buy calls from plumbing questions, rentals and job seekers, the same noise the earlier chapters spent so much effort cutting out.
It also needs volume. The gate is the same one Chapter 6 used for broad match, about 30 booked jobs a month, and Performance Max comes after broad match has had time to prove itself: usually around months six or seven. A company with a bigger budget gets there sooner. Start before that and Performance Max is guessing with your money across six channels at once.
On launch day, the goal is booked water damage jobs and nothing else. Hold off on a target cost per job while Performance Max is new. Give it a few weeks to show what a job costs through its channels, then set the target from that number, the same way Chapter 6 set one for broad match. Use the same Presence location setting as the Search campaigns (Chapter 9).
Final URL Expansion Lets Performance Max Choose the Landing Page. 9 of 12 Restoration Home Pages We Read Linked to a Blog.
In a Performance Max campaign, you give each set of ads a landing page. A setting named Final URL expansion, on by default in new Performance Max campaigns, gives Google permission to override your water damage page with any page on the same domain that its system prefers for that search. Google's own help page admits the catch: without URL exclusions, some ads may end up pointing at pages you never meant to advertise.
Look at what a typical restoration site offers Google to choose from. In one example market, Sacramento, we read the links on the home pages of 12 restoration companies. Nine linked to a blog. Two linked to a careers page. One linked to its payment terms. And 11 of the 12 had pages for mold, fire, commercial work or rebuilds sitting beside the water damage page.
Every one of those is a page Performance Max could pick. A homeowner with a wet floor who lands on a blog post about preventing frozen pipes reads it, maybe, and leaves. A click that lands on careers was paid for by a job seeker. A water damage search sent to the commercial page loses the homeowner in the first sentence.
You have two ways to fence it:
- Exclude the pages that should never be landing pages. Blog posts, careers, payment and login pages, and any do-it-yourself article.
- Or switch expansion off and give each set of ads its own service page: water damage to the water page, mold to the mold page, the same pairing Chapter 4 built for Search.
There's a quieter cost too. A click that lands on a blog post still counts as a click Performance Max bought for you, and if that visitor fills out a newsletter form, a careless conversion setup counts it as a lead. The campaign then learns that blog visitors are what you want, and finds more of them. Fences on the pages protect the learning as well as the budget.
We put the exclusions in before launch, every time. If a company's site is full of pages that should never get ad traffic, switching expansion off is the stricter fence: every click lands on the service page you chose.
Brand Exclusions Keep Performance Max Off Your Own Company's Name. Your Brand Campaign Already Owns Those Searches.
Left alone, Performance Max will gladly show ads on searches for your own company name. A homeowner who types your company's name has usually already chosen you. Performance Max will still take credit for that call, and at a glance its cost per job will look terrific.
Chapter 2 put brand searches in their own campaign from month one. Performance Max should leave them there. If your brand searches already live in a campaign of their own, Google's help page on brand exclusions recommends blocking your brand from Performance Max. Add your company name, and any name customers use for you, as a brand exclusion before the campaign goes live.
The same tool can keep Performance Max off competitors' names, which matches the negative keywords Chapter 5 put on every Search campaign.
Audience Signals Are Only Hints. Performance Max Can Reach Past Them to Anyone Likely to Convert.
Performance Max doesn't use keyword lists the way Search does. Instead, you give it hints.
Search themes tell it what kinds of searches you want. Pull them from the searches that have actually booked jobs in the exact match and broad match campaigns: "water damage restoration," "flooded basement cleanup," "mold remediation." Not from what sounds good.
Audience signals describe the people to look for. For the audience hint, build a custom segment from two things you already have: the search terms that turned into signed work authorizations, and the websites of the franchise locations and independents from Chapter 5. That's a description of who Google should look for, not a list of people to follow around.
Treat the audience signals as suggestions. Google is open about this: if the system thinks someone outside those signals is likely to convert, it can show them the ad anyway. That's by design. It's also why the booked-job goal and the page exclusions matter more than the hints: they're the fences that actually hold.
Performance Max Makes Its Own Video When You Don't Upload One. Footage of a Real Dry-Out Beats It.
YouTube is one of the six places this campaign shows ads. Skip the video and Google fills the gap itself: its list of Performance Max automation features shows auto-generated video switched on unless you change it, stitched together from whatever photos and text you uploaded. It also creates extra versions of any video you do upload, also on by default.
An auto-made slideshow of stock-looking photos doesn't sell a restoration company. A minute of real footage does, and it doesn't need a production crew. A phone video of your crew rolling in drying equipment, a technician taking a moisture reading on a wet wall, the owner explaining what happens in the first hour. Homeowners have never seen this work before their own emergency. Showing it is the most convincing thing you can do.
The same goes for images. Upload photos of your own trucks, crews and finished rooms, not stock pictures of smiling people holding mops.
Exact Match Keywords Beat Performance Max on the Searches They Match. The Water Damage Keywords You Chose Stay Yours.
Restoration owners often ask whether Performance Max will steal the water damage searches the exact match campaign has been winning. For those keywords, the answer is no. Google's overview gives a Search campaign's exact match keyword first claim on any search that matches it. Performance Max's search themes only compete at the level of phrase and broad match.
So the exact match campaign from Chapter 6 keeps running, and keeps its searches. Performance Max works around it: other searches, other channels, other people.
Judge it on the same thing as everything else: booked jobs and their cost. If Performance Max reports lots of conversions but the signed work authorizations from the Chapter 1 tracking don't move, it's counting something you didn't mean to pay for. Check the goal, then the pages it's sending people to, before you raise its budget.
One more change is already underway. Starting in August 2026, the pay-per-lead listings restorers know from Local Services Ads began shifting into Performance Max, and Google names water damage among the first categories to move. Chapter 12 covers what that means for a restoration company's Local Services listing.
Next: Homeowners Ask Google What to Do First After a Leak.
Performance Max waits for booked jobs. Chapter 11 looks at a campaign that reaches homeowners earlier, while they're still searching what to do about the water: Demand Gen video, and when it's worth the budget.
Want the whole plan first? The guide home lists all sixteen chapters. Chapter 9 covers the launch settings Performance Max should share.
When a restoration company hands us its account for Google Ads management, Performance Max doesn't start until the booked jobs are flowing, and the page exclusions go in before the first click.
