Google Search or Performance Max Ad? Which Campaign Type to Start With
Open a new Google Ads account and you'll be nudged toward Performance Max. The setup is quick, the pitch is nice ("let Google's AI find your customers across everything"), and the on-screen tips keep pointing you that way.
For a lot of small businesses, it's the wrong place to start.
Performance Max is a good product. It just does its best work when it has plenty of data and a clear idea of what a good customer looks like. A new account with a $1,000 a month budget has neither.
What the two campaign types actually do
A Search campaign shows your ad when someone types something into Google. You pick the words. If you're an electrician in Tauranga, you bid on things like "emergency electrician Tauranga" and your ad appears for those searches. You can see exactly which searches triggered it.
Performance Max (people call it PMax) works differently. You hand Google your headlines, photos, videos and a few hints, and it decides where to show you: Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the Display network, which is the ads you see on random websites and apps. It mixes and matches everything on its own.
That sounds like more reach, and it is. But reach isn't the problem for most small businesses. The problem is spending a small budget on the right people.
Why Search is usually the better first step
Think about what you're paying for. Someone typing "blocked drain Hamilton" at 7pm wants a plumber now. Someone seeing a video ad while watching YouTube might just be bored. Both count as a click, but they're worth very different amounts.
With Search, you choose where your money goes. With PMax, Google chooses, and it's trained to find whatever is cheapest to count as a win. If your "win" is a form fill, it'll happily bring you lots of form fills from people who never answer the phone.
One agency looked at more than 3,300 PMax campaigns for businesses that don't sell products online. When Search and PMax could both show for the same searches, Search turned more of those clicks into leads 84% of the time. That's one agency's study, so don't treat it as gospel. But it matches what we see.
PMax also needs data. A rough rule from the same agency: have around 50 conversions a month in Search before you add PMax. If you get 8 enquiries a month, it won't have much to learn from.
When Performance Max starts to make sense
PMax earns its place once the basics are working. A few signs you're ready:
Your Search campaign is already bringing in enquiries at a price you're happy with.
Your tracking counts real calls and real enquiries, not page views. If you haven't checked that, fix it first, because PMax will learn from whatever you tell it counts.
You can spare roughly $100 a day, so it has room to test.
You can wait about three months before judging it. Judging it after a fortnight is a common mistake.
Even then, keep it small. A sensible split is about 80% of the budget on Search and 20% on PMax, then shift slowly as PMax proves itself. If it's bringing leads that cost more or close less, pull it back.
Google has also made PMax easier to peek into. There's now a channel report showing where your ads actually ran, and you can add up to 50 "search themes" (short phrases that tell Google what your customers search for) to each group of ads. Both help. They don't turn PMax into a Search campaign, though.
Three things to check if you already run PMax
First, open the channel report and see where the money went. If most of it went to Display or YouTube and you sell emergency repairs, that's a mismatch.
Second, look at your own brand name. PMax loves to show ads to people already searching for your business, because those people convert easily. It makes the numbers look great while you'd have got them for free. Add your brand as an exclusion if you can, or at least check how much of the result comes from it.
Third, run Search alongside it, with your core searches, so you're not leaving the most valuable clicks to a system you can't see into. Having both usually means they overlap a bit, but you keep a campaign you fully control.
A simple way to decide
If you're starting from zero: run Search only, on a small list of searches that show real buying intent, and get your tracking right. Give it two or three months.
If Search is working and you want more: add PMax at a small share of the budget and judge it on real enquiries and real jobs, not the numbers inside Google Ads.
