How Do Performance Max Campaigns Work?

You hand Performance Max four things: a goal, a budget, your assets and your audience signals. An asset group, in Google's own words, is a collection of creatives centered on a theme or target audience, and Google Ads uses those assets to build the ads. If you sell products, your Merchant Center feed goes in too.

Google keeps everything else. Which surface each cent goes to, which product or asset shows, which auction to enter, at what price. There are no keywords to add and no per-channel budgets to split. That is the trade. You give up control over the split, you get reach, and you get one report at the end instead of six.

Audience signals get read as targeting, and they are not. Google's help page says its AI is enhanced when you add audience signals to a Performance Max campaign. It does not describe them as a hard targeting restriction.

So treat a signal as a starting hint. You are telling Google where to look first, not building a wall around who can see the ad. If you need a real fence, that has to come from the things you can genuinely control: which products are in the campaign, your exclusions, and your budget.

One budget across six surfaces means one report across six surfaces. You see the total, not which surface earned it. Scaley AI works on the levers that still sit outside the black box. It tags every SKU by margin and velocity, then syncs those tags into your Merchant Center custom labels every day. A campaign can then bid on profit instead of revenue. It also surfaces the searches and placements worth excluding. It watches 24/7, prepares each move with the reason attached, and writes nothing until you approve it. It is our software, so weigh all that accordingly.

A human still wins the jobs software should not touch. Choosing the hero products, arguing the offer, deciding whether Performance Max should be running at all this quarter. That is a senior buyer or a good agency, not a tool.

And if you want to build your own automation rules over the top, Optmyzr publishes Rule Engine Automations on every plan tier. Scaley has no rule builder in it. It prepares the moves and waits for your yes instead.