Performance Max in 2025: Negative Keywords and Channel Reporting Arrive

Performance Max Finally Gives Advertisers the Controls They Asked For

Since Performance Max launched broadly in 2022, the most consistent criticism from search advertisers has not been about results - it has been about visibility and control. PMax consolidated campaign types into a single automated format and extended reach across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps simultaneously. The tradeoff was opacity: you could not see what was working by channel, you could not block specific search queries at the campaign level, and you had limited ability to guide the automation toward the query types you actually wanted.

In early 2025, Google rolled out a set of changes that directly address those complaints: campaign-level negative keywords, channel-level performance reporting, and search themes for guiding query coverage. None of these restore the granular manual control that existed in Standard Shopping or legacy search campaigns, but together they represent a meaningful shift in how manageable PMax accounts are in practice.

Campaign-Level Negative Keywords

This is the most practically significant addition. Prior to this change, advertisers had limited options for excluding irrelevant queries from Performance Max campaigns - account-level negative keyword lists could be applied, but campaign-level exclusions were not available through the standard interface. For advertisers running PMax alongside other campaign types, this created situations where PMax was cannibalizing branded search, competing with exact-match search campaigns, or picking up clearly irrelevant traffic with no direct remedy.

Campaign-level negatives change the management calculus in a few concrete ways:

• Brand protection: You can now explicitly exclude branded terms from a PMax campaign when you have a separate branded search campaign you want to control manually. This reduces the blending of branded and non-branded attribution that made PMax performance analysis difficult.
• Competitor and irrelevant query exclusion: Queries that convert poorly or are fundamentally outside your target audience can now be excluded at the campaign level without affecting other campaigns in the account.
• Campaign segmentation integrity: If you run multiple PMax campaigns segmented by product line or geography, campaign-level negatives let you enforce cleaner boundaries between them.

A few important caveats: negative keywords in PMax operate as broad match exclusions - they exclude the term and close variants, not just exact matches. And they do not give you the same granular query-level pruning that a Standard Shopping or search campaign allows. Think of them as exclusion fences for categories of traffic rather than scalpels for individual queries.

Channel-Level Performance Reporting

Previously, PMax performance data was reported in aggregate. You could see total impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost - but you could not see how much of your budget was going to YouTube versus Display versus Search, or which channel was driving which share of conversions.

Channel-level reporting surfaces the breakdown by channel, giving you visibility into where your budget is actually being allocated and where conversions are coming from. This matters for several practical reasons:

• Budget allocation decisions: If a large share of your PMax spend is going to Display or YouTube and those channels are not contributing meaningfully to conversions, you now have the data to make a documented case for adjustments - either through asset group configuration, final URL expansion settings, or by testing whether a more constrained asset setup shifts allocation toward higher-performing channels.
• Creative investment decisions: If YouTube is consuming significant budget, the quality and relevance of your video assets matters more than you might have assumed. Channel reporting makes that connection explicit.
• Account-level conversation with Google reps: Having channel data changes the nature of optimization conversations. 'PMax is underperforming' is less actionable than 'PMax is spending heavily on Display with a conversion rate well below Search - here is what we want to address.'

Search Themes

Search themes are signals you provide to guide what queries Performance Max targets on the Search and Shopping networks. They are not keywords in the traditional sense - you cannot set match types or bids on them. They function as directional inputs that tell the automation what topic areas are relevant, particularly useful when your landing pages or product feeds do not immediately signal the full breadth of your target query set.

Well-configured search themes can help PMax find relevant queries it might otherwise miss, especially for newer campaigns with limited conversion history. They also provide some transparency into what you are trying to tell the algorithm - a documented record of your intent that goes beyond asset content alone.

Use search themes for query territory you know is valuable but suspect PMax is underindexing on - not as a substitute for strong asset group content and a well-structured product feed, which remain the primary signals the automation uses.

What Has Not Changed

It is worth being direct about the limits of these additions. Performance Max is still a largely automated format. You cannot set bids by channel, you cannot control creative rotation at the placement level, and you cannot pull a search term report with the same granularity as a Standard search campaign. The new controls improve visibility and reduce specific waste vectors - they do not make PMax behave like a manually controlled campaign.

The practical implication: PMax is well-suited to advertisers with strong asset libraries, clean conversion tracking, and sufficient conversion volume for the algorithm to learn effectively. The new controls make it more manageable for sophisticated accounts, but they do not fix the underlying challenges for accounts with thin conversion data or unclear brand positioning.

Putting It Together

For most accounts running PMax, the immediate priorities are: apply campaign-level negatives for brand terms and clearly irrelevant categories, pull the channel breakdown to understand where budget is going, and review search themes to ensure you are guiding the automation toward your actual target queries. These are not one-time tasks - they belong in regular account maintenance cadences alongside asset quality reviews and audience signal audits.

Performance Max managed well is a genuinely powerful format. Managed passively, it allocates budget based on what it can win rather than what you need to win. The 2025 controls help close that gap, but they require someone paying attention to them. Our PPC management practice includes active Performance Max governance - channel monitoring, negative keyword maintenance, and the ongoing configuration work that keeps automation aligned with business goals. If you want a review of how your current PMax campaigns are configured and where the biggest efficiency gains are, book a call.