Google is kicking off 2025 with a suite of new Performance Max (PMAX) features to give advertisers in South Africa greater control, transparency and improved results. Building on the momentum of 2024, these updates empower businesses to leverage the full power of Google’s AI and channels within a single campaign.
Google Ads is enhancing campaign controls and AI steering to give advertisers more precision and power. A key update is the rollout of campaign-level negative keywords, a highly requested feature that offers greater control over brand suitability and exclusions.
Additionally, a new customer acquisition goal with a high-value mode allows advertisers to specify high-value customers using Customer Match. This empowers Google AI to prioritise users likely to maximize lifetime value, with campaign-level reporting providing insights into both new and high-value customer acquisition. Retailers using product feeds now have granular control over brand exclusions across Search and Shopping ads, enabling tailored strategies for each ad format.
Further enhancements include “URL contains” rules for product feeds, which expand targeting based on specific page categories within a website, now available for Performance Max campaigns. Two features currently in beta are demographic exclusions, allowing the exclusion of specific age brackets, and device targeting, enabling customization of targeting to computer, mobile, or tablet traffic. Advertisers interested in participating in the beta programs for demographic exclusions and device targeting should contact their Google Ads account team or Google Ads support.
“We are acutely aware of the ever changing commercial landscape and recognise that businesses desire tools that not only put them directly in the drivers seat, but also provide deeper and actionable insight into searches, as well as optimised reporting. Simply put, the new and improved PMAX provides more controls and better reporting to help advertisers and businesses guide the AI to work better,” says Laura Smith-Roberts at Google.
Google’s enhanced campaign controls and AI steering bring deeper search reporting and insights. Search themes, which allow advertisers to specify relevant search queries, are officially launching with improvements. These enhancements include a “search terms insights source column” to identify whether queries originate from Performance Max’s keywordless targeting or added search themes, and a “search themes usefulness indicator” to gauge the effectiveness of provided search themes in driving incremental traffic. Furthermore, improved asset group reporting allows for segmentation and download of asset group performance by device, time, and other dimensions, enabling more detailed analysis.
The updates also deliver richer, more engaging lifestyle images with people and faces. AI image generation using text prompts is now available across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, and App campaigns, enabling the creation of images containing adults and faces. Strict guardrails are in place to prevent inappropriate content, and generated images will be tagged with SynthID. Additionally, the platform offers asset-audience recommendations for improving image effectiveness and AI-generated image suggestions to streamline asset creation.
Originally launched in late 2020 and officially launched to all advertisers at the end of 2021, the new features will enable businesses to optimise their targeting and ad placements, using a single campaign across platforms such as YouTube and Search. This ultimately allows for a broader reach and optimised performance to ensure that specific advertising goals are achieved.
For more information about the new updates to PMAX, access the new blog post from Tal Akabas, Director of Product Management, Google Ads here.
