Ever feel like your ad campaigns are playing hide and seek with your target audience? In 2025, Google Ads is doubling down on AI-powered automation, but it’s not just about setting and forgetting. The latest wave of updates, particularly around Performance Max campaigns, is shaking up how we track, control, and optimise ad performance.
What is it?
Google rolled out significant enhancements to Performance Max campaigns this year. These include:
- More granular control with high-value customer acquisition goals tailored to focus on your best prospects.
- Brand and demographic exclusions, allowing you to fine-tune who sees your ads, cutting down wasted spend.
- Device targeting improvements to balance reach and conversions across platforms.
- A boost in transparency via enhanced search reporting: The search theme limit jumped from 25 to 50 per asset group, giving deeper insight into how specific query groups drive your ad reach.
- New asset group segmentation and downloadable reports to make campaign performance data easier to digest and act on.
These updates reflect a shift from broad AI-optimised campaigns towards giving advertisers a tighter grip on targeting and data insights.
Why does it matter?
For those of us knee-deep in daily campaign management, these tweaks are more than just bells and whistles. From real-world grunt work like syncing inventory with Shopify or generating campaign briefs, these changes affect strategy and hands-on execution in two clear ways:
- Smart Spending, Smarter Targeting: The added ability to exclude demographics or brands means you’re less likely to burn budget on clicks that don’t convert. This is a game changer for niche products where audience precision is king. Instead of the blanket Performance Max approach, you get more surgical targeting , think less scattergun, more sharpshooter.
- Deeper Data Means Better Decisions: With twice the search theme limit and clearer reporting, you can stop guessing which keyword clusters are working. That’s a micro-wow when you’re auto-summarising call transcripts or testing creatives because you can plug in actual search data, not just broad trends.
But here’s the kicker: While these AI-driven optimisations promise efficiency, they also demand a stronger human touch to wrangle the data and set the right guardrails. If you blindly trust automation without these new controls, you risk the classic Ctrl-Z moment, budget wasted on irrelevant clicks.
For advertisers, this means:
- Revisiting Performance Max campaigns with fresh eyes and digging into the new segmentation tools.
- Testing brand and demographic exclusions to uncover where your budget leaks.
- Using the enhanced reporting as a north star for creative tweaks and bid adjustments rather than a rear-view mirror.
This update isn’t just another checkbox; it’s the digital version of duct-taping your campaign leaks, works fast, but you’ll regret ignoring subtle data signals.
If you’re still running Performance Max like 2023, congratulations, you’re already dating last year’s algorithms. It’s time to get aggressive with these controls or risk being unicorned by competitors riding the AI wave smarter.
