Performance Max has become the format Google offers by default to almost every SME that opens an advertising account. A representative calls, offers to automate everything, and a few weeks later the budget is spent without anyone really knowing where the enquiries came from. This guide explains what Performance Max actually does, when it is a better choice than a classic Search campaign, and how to run it on the budgets a Swiss SME typically commits, roughly 800 to 3,000 CHF per month.
What Performance Max actually does
Performance Max is not a campaign type in the traditional sense. It is a container that pushes a single pool of creative assets across all of Google's inventory at once: search results, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. You choose neither the keywords, nor the placements, nor how the budget is split between those networks. You supply three things: a conversion goal, creative assets (headlines, descriptions, images, videos and possibly a product feed) and signals about your customer base. The algorithm decides the rest.
That delegation has one direct consequence: the quality of what you feed in becomes your only real lever. On a Search campaign you fix a bad result by adjusting keywords, bids or a specific ad. On Performance Max those controls do not exist. You improve the inputs, or you switch the campaign off.
When to choose Performance Max over Search
Performance Max becomes worthwhile in three situations. First, when you have a product catalogue and a clean Merchant Center feed: this is the use case the format was built for, and it effectively replaces the old smart Shopping campaigns. Second, when your potential demand far exceeds the available search volume: a well-known tradesperson in Geneva already captures most of the search traffic for their trade, and growth will come from YouTube or Discover instead. Third, when you generate enough conversions for the algorithm to learn from, meaning at least around thirty measured actions per month.
Search remains preferable in the opposite cases. If you sell a high-intent, locally bound service such as emergency repairs, a clinic, a law firm or an accounting practice, the user is already typing exactly what they want: you do not need an algorithm to guess their intent, you need to appear on the right queries and exclude the wrong ones. If your monthly budget is below roughly 800 CHF, Search will also give you far more useful control. And if you are starting with no conversion history at all, run Search for two to three months to feed the account with data before opening Performance Max. That is the sequence we apply in our Google Ads work in Geneva.
The data that drives the machine
Conversion tracking comes first
A Performance Max campaign wired to badly defined conversions optimises towards nothing. The most common trap in SMEs: counting every view of the contact page, every click on a phone number and every form submission as a conversion, then seeing an apparently excellent cost per acquisition while the phone stays silent. Define one single primary conversion that reflects a genuine commercial enquiry, and demote everything else to secondary conversions that are observed but not optimised for.
If you can push the real value of signed business back into Google Ads, do it: this is what separates a campaign buying form fills from a campaign buying revenue. On a long sales cycle, a monthly export from your CRM into offline conversions is more than enough.
Product feeds and landing pages
For an online shop, the Merchant Center feed is the heart of the campaign: explicit titles, correct categories, clean images, up-to-date availability. For a service business, the equivalent is the quality of your pages: one page per service, content that answers the actual question, a form visible without scrolling, a reasonable load time on mobile. A Performance Max campaign pointed at a generic homepage wastes budget every single time, which makes the topic inseparable from the quality of the website itself.
Audience signals
Audience signals are not targeting: they are starting hints. Supply your customer lists, your recent visitors, a custom audience built on the terms your clients genuinely search for, and your direct competitors' websites. The algorithm uses them as a seed, then expands. Vague signals lead to immediate expansion towards cheap traffic with no commercial value.
Creative assets make the real difference
A Performance Max campaign runs largely on visual inventory. If you do not supply video, Google generates one automatically from your images, and the result almost always works against your brand. Plan for at least one vertical and one horizontal video of ten to twenty seconds, even filmed simply on a phone, plus images in square, landscape and portrait formats.
On the text side, write headlines that say something concrete: the service, the area covered, the lead time, the guarantee, the starting price. Avoid interchangeable phrasing such as quality and professionalism, which gives no information to the user or the system. A good habit is to produce visuals and videos in batches once a quarter rather than one at a time under pressure.
Brand exclusions and junk traffic
By default, Performance Max captures searches on your own company name and claims them as conversions. For a locally known SME this can represent a large share of the reported results: you are paying for customers who would have found you anyway. Enable brand exclusion lists for your name and its spelling variants, and keep a separate brand campaign if you want to defend your name against competitors.
Add content exclusions to avoid unsuitable placements, and monitor the search terms shown in the dedicated report. That report is not exhaustive, but it reveals the obvious drift: job seekers, purely informational queries with no purchase intent, or requests for a product you do not sell.
What is a realistic minimum budget in CHF
There is no official threshold, but experience of the Swiss market gives useful orders of magnitude. Below roughly 800 CHF per month, Performance Max lacks the data to exit its learning phase and behaves erratically from one week to the next. Between 800 and 1,500 CHF per month the format becomes usable, provided conversion tracking is clean and you accept two months of learning without drawing conclusions too early. Above 2,000 to 3,000 CHF per month you can start segmenting into several campaigns, by product range or by margin.
Add one Swiss reality to this: in competitive sectors of French-speaking Switzerland, cost per click often sits between 2 and 6 CHF, and higher still in legal services, private healthcare or real estate. A 500 CHF budget buys a few dozen clicks a month there, which is not enough for any algorithmic learning. Our quotes are built around that reality rather than around promises of volume.
Measuring and diagnosing a campaign
Three indicators matter more than the rest. Cost per primary conversion, compared with what you can genuinely afford to pay for a new customer given your margin. The share of conversions coming from brand searches, which you should mentally subtract from the headline result. And the weekly conversion volume, which tells you whether the algorithm has enough material to learn from.
When results degrade, look in this order: the asset group report, to spot creative rated as low quality; insights and search terms, to detect traffic drift; then the stability of conversion tracking, because a tag broken after a site redesign remains the number one cause of unexplained drops. Change one variable at a time and leave at least two weeks between structural changes, since every significant edit restarts a learning phase.
The mistakes that come up most often
- Launching Performance Max with no conversion history and no reliable tracking.
- Counting micro-actions as primary conversions.
- Letting Google generate your videos for you.
- Forgetting to exclude your own brand and overstating performance.
- Killing the campaign after three weeks, before learning has finished.
- Sending all traffic to the homepage instead of dedicated pages.
Performance Max is neither a magic wand nor a scam: it is a system that returns exactly the quality of what it is given. For a Swiss SME the right sequence is almost always the same: clean tracking, solid pages, Search first, then Performance Max once the data exists. Before committing budget, get an honest opinion on the real state of your account.