By: Michael Shafkowitz
In its July 2025 update, Google rolled out a suite of new features designed to give advertisers more say in how their Performance Max (PMax) campaigns run, more transparency into performance, and smarter insights to guide strategy.
For the past few years, PMax has been the go-to for advertisers who want Google’s AI to do the heavy lifting across multiple channels at once, from Search to YouTube to Display. But while the automation has been powerful, advertisers have been left in the dark, wanting more control and clearer data insights. These latest updates address exactly that. Whether you’re focused on protecting your brand, expanding your reach, or optimizing creative assets, the new tools make it easier to steer PMax in the right direction without losing the efficiency of Google’s AI machine learning.
If you’ve been using PMax for full-funnel campaigns, now’s the perfect time to dive into what’s new and see how these changes can help improve your campaigns.
Sharpen Targeting: New Controls
With PMax, Google is providing more control than ever over who sees your ads and where they show up:
- Campaign-level negative keyword lists are here. Want to avoid a full list of irrelevant or non-brand safe terms across all your campaigns? You can now do so from one list, instead of updating each campaign individually.
- You can now double your search theme amount and add up to 50 search themes per asset group (up from 25) for expanded reach.
- Demographic targeting just got deeper. You can now include or exclude by device type and age range. Additionally, a gender-based demographic targeting beta is now also available.
These updates will allow advertisers to have even more control over their preferred audiences, allowing for deeper and more refined targeting.
Smarter Reporting & Diagnostics
Understanding who you’re reaching and how to improve just got easier:
- You can now more accurately track new versus returning customers in PMax campaigns. This means no more “Unknown” labels in your reports. According to one of Google’s latest support articles, they have updated their ability to accurately estimate whether or not a converter is new or existing.
- With updates to diagnostics and recommendations, Google has made it easier to flag missing or misconfigured tags, goals, and conversion actions, helping you fix issues before they derail performance.
Better Visibility into Creative Performance
Creativity deserves clarity, and now Google PMax delivers:
- You’ll now see full asset stats, including cost, conversions, clicks, and more at the asset level.
- Final URL expansion assets are now clearly listed in reporting, meaning, “You can now see all assets created with text customization and final URL expansion and you can also remove them if you no longer want them to run.” (Unlock more visibility and control in Performance Max – Google Ads Help)
- Google is now also offering AI-backed creative suggestions to improve quality and overall performance. Recommendations will link directly to the AI-powered Image Editor in Google Ads so users can conveniently make changes.
Why These Updates Matter
Taken together, these upgrades provide strategic clarity and control that were previously missing from PMax. You can protect your brand, reach the right people more effectively, make quick adjustments based on real data, and fine-tune your creative, all while still taking advantage of Google’s AI to do the heavy lifting.
If you’re looking to make the most of these new PMax features and drive stronger results, our team is here to help—contact us to learn how we can put them to work for your brand.
