01Creative
Asset signals
Which headline, image, and video combinations are carrying each audience, and which assets are quietly never served.
Platform / Google
Performance MaxOne view of every Performance Max signal.
Assets, audiences, search themes, products, and budget decisions brought into a clearer operating rhythm instead of a single black-box number.
- Input streams
- 4
- Campaign to read
- 1
- Guardrails
- 7
Input streams
Campaign to read
Guardrails
The inputs
Four streams feed one campaign.
Performance Max will not tell you which of them is limiting performance. Reading them separately is the only way to know which lever is worth pulling.
02Spend
Budget direction
Where spend is finding value across product sets, channels, and new-customer versus returning traffic.
03Intent
Search themes
How search category signals connect to outcomes, and where brand traffic is being counted as incremental.
04Feed
Product coverage
Which products are eligible, which are disapproved, and which ones absorb spend out of proportion to their margin.
- 4
- Input streams tracked
- 100%
- Asset groups covered
- 1
- Change at a time
- 0
- Unexplained spend shifts
The problem
A broad campaign is not a simple one.
Performance Max collapses search, shopping, display, video, and discovery into a single reported line. That makes it easy to run and very hard to operate, because every diagnosis has to be reconstructed from inputs the campaign does not report on directly.
- Brand traffic separated from genuinely incremental demand
- Feed health treated as a performance input, not a catalog chore
- Asset coverage checked per audience rather than per campaign
What is actually running
- Search?
- Shopping?
- Display?
- Video?
- Discovery?
Performance Max1 reported line
Channel-level split is not reported. Every diagnosis has to be rebuilt from the inputs.
The operating model
Read the campaign, then improve one part of it.
Three passes, repeated. The discipline is changing one input at a time so the result is still readable two weeks later.
Diagnose
Find the signal holding it back
Separate feed problems, asset gaps, audience mismatch, and simple budget limits before deciding anything.
Prioritize
Pick the change with the clearest impact
One input at a time, chosen for how readable its effect will be afterward.
Learn
Compare the outcome
Measure against what was expected, then carry the lesson into the next asset group.
Guardrails that stay visible
- Brand and non-brand split
- New-customer targets
- Product exclusions
- Asset-group budget floors
- Feed quality thresholds
- Minimum ROAS per product set
- Reporting freshness checks