Performance Max (PMax), once primarily for eCommerce, has evolved into a viable tool for lead generation, provided advertisers use quality data and proper setup. While it’s not flawless—spam and algorithm issues persist—it can deliver strong results when paired with good inputs like qualified lead lists and pipeline data.
Not long ago, running lead generation campaigns on Performance Max (recommended after maxing out Search) meant you were either crazy or rich – or both. This ‘Power Pair’ was largely reserved for eCommerce and retail advertisers with strong product feeds and deep pockets.
Performance Max has improved significantly and rapidly. While spam is still rampant and safeguards are still needed, lead-based businesses can get good results if they have quality data inputs and the supporting technology.
Why Performance Max works well for lead generation
If you know your way around Performance Max for lead gen, feel free to skip this part. But if this is your first time testing it, here’s some information that you ought to know because it might save the day.
It’s not always Google’s fault
Performance Max has its flaws, but it also receives unfair criticism – especially in situations where the actual fault lies with the advertiser or marketer.
For example, not providing good quality inputs like a qualified lead list or pipeline values means you’re asking Performance Max to educate itself. This is possible but takes more trial and error, which means you end up spending more and waiting longer before results actually become good.
Qualified pipeline data is like gold for machine learning
Performance Max and lead generation are theoretically made for each other. Both run on data, both are susceptible to optimizing for the wrong outcomes, and both depend on the quality and accuracy of data to deliver ideal outcomes.
For services and products that sit behind a sales process, qualified leads are the best thing to optimize against as they indicate pipeline quality. Unless you have an army of resources to throw at every single lead, they are the opportunities you need to focus on simply because they have a better chance of turning into revenue.
If you can optimize your ad campaigns to go after people who share traits with others who are most likely to buy from you, why would you say no to that?
You can hedge against things going wrong
Even for advertisers and agencies that set up and manage Performance Max correctly, things can still go wrong. Bidding algorithms can malfunction, auto-generated assets can be of poor quality, and errors can result in the wrong actions or stages being valued improperly.
There’s a fine line between monitoring campaigns and micromanaging them. Keep an eye on progress, but invest the effort to get the initial setup right. Making changes soon after going live only resets the learning phase and costs you more.
Learning where that line is and how to walk it is how you get Performance Max to work the way you want it to.
How to set up Performance Max to bid against qualified leads
Bringing qualified pipeline data into Google Ads requires some setup. This process can feel cumbersome, especially if your client isn’t invested in working with you to make it happen. But it is critical enough that if you can’t complete these steps, I advise you to choose a non-algorithmic campaign instead.
Make sure conversion tracking and spam guards are working
Before you do anything else, you want your conversion actions to be set up so that they can be tracked properly and keep as much spam out as possible. In addition to having your tags and pixels set up and firing, this means:
- Having some type of spam guard in place for form submissions, such as reCAPTCHA
- Tracking form and call conversions in a CRM or other technology from which you can feed lead data back to Google
Set up your CRM integration and offline conversions
Once you have your data source in place, start getting that information back into Google Ads. For lead gen, there are many ways to get people into a CRM or other customer database:
- Form submissions
- Phone calls
- Contact inquiries
The information that you really need to get from the CRM is your list of qualified leads. These are potential customers who have shown interest in your product or service, and who’ve been identified as having revenue potential by a person or system on the brand side. These could be people who’ve been verified as real human beings, willing to spend a certain amount of money, etc.
It’s important that qualified leads all entered the CRM by converting from a Google Ads campaign, as that’s the only way they can have a Google Click ID (GCLID) – a hashed identifier that allows Google to read their data.
Salesforce and HubSpot have direct integrations with Google Ads, though for the latter you need to set it up through their web app. For many clients, we use the only option available to pass data from other CRMs back to Google: a tool like Zapier or Make.
Recreate your pipeline in Google Ads
The next step is looking at purchase data to determine the most valuable pipeline stages. For one of our healthcare clients, that would be an admission to their facility. This can be split further into patients paying via Medicaid and patients paying out of pocket – each is worth a different average value.
Make sure that you have at least 30 conversion actions per month, which is the floor that Google is looking for in order to optimize well.
For most Search campaigns, we’ll set up Target CPA and drive form submissions, phone calls, and pretty much any other possible conversion.
But with Performance Max, form submissions are prone to spam at an outsized rate while phone calls are not. So we set the campaign goals to not look at form submissions—only calls longer than 60-90 seconds and qualified leads coming from your CRM.
By doing this at a campaign level instead of making it the account default, Performance Max only looks at data which is less prone to spam.
We also set up custom columns to track our pipeline goal of physical admissions to the healthcare facility, splitting them into out-of-pocket billing and Medicaid claims. We can feed this information back to Google as long as it’s within the 90-day window before the conversion’s GCLID expires.
This approach works. It takes a bit of setup and goes beyond simply managing the ad account, which a lot of Google Ads practitioners don’t want to do or brush off as not part of the job. But I think times are changing and what used to be extra to the role is now table stakes.
Performance Max campaign advice for lead generation
This section assumes you understand the business being advertised, its audience, their challenges and needs, and how they buy. It’s designed to help you give your process shape and order.
Account management and campaign structure
I find that keeping campaign structure simple tends to get better results on Performance Max. This means a different asset group for each theme, audience or pain point.
So for a business that does handyman repairs for offices and homes, that might look like a separate asset group for each category. For a landscaping specialist serving three adjacent cities, each city and zipcode might have its own asset group and targeting.
Remember that smaller budgets will be spread thin even within a single campaign if you have a lot of different asset groups. If you’re constrained by spend, try aiming for a narrower and less dense campaign structure with fewer campaigns overall.
Negative keywords and Search Themes are important in Performance Max, though not as much as search. Google said that account managers will be able to set up our own campaign-level negatives, but the rollout has not finished yet so you may not see this option.
Audience signals can also give your campaign a boost. For example, your customer list might give Performance Max an idea of who you consider of high value to your business. But it won’t necessarily target those specific users, and it will go beyond those limits once it understands what types of leads you’re happy with.
Ads and creative assets
Lead generation brands typically don’t use feeds, so you won’t show up in product listings or other Shopping inventory. But you can show up anywhere else that’s covered in Performance Max, such as:
- Text ads on SERPs and partner sites
- Maps and listings when running local ads
- Video ads on YouTube
- Banner ads on partner sites and YouTube
Text ads and rich media (videos and static display) will probably be your bread and butter, so invest in creating catchy ads. Any asset types you don’t upload may be auto-generated by Google, so if you want to play it safe stick to Search.
As for the ads and creatives themselves, they should line up with the audience you’re targeting and what their pain points are. This is why asset grouping is so important. You may not want an ad for heated pools to show to buyers in Texas, but you might like to advertise to potential customers in Michigan.
Similarly, someone searching for fire damage restoration shouldn’t see an ad for flood damage restoration. The intents are too disparate, even if there are search terms with overlapping intent.
Bidding strategies
I typically will run lead generation on Performance Max with Target CPA bidding i.e. Maximize Conversions with a target CPA value. You can start with Max Conversions and add a CPA target later on—Google recommends a budget 5-15x your target CPA—which gives the system some time and room to breathe.
Once achieved, this end state lets Google understand that it should exhaust your budget while still converting users within a given cost, and the qualified lead data further refines the quality. So now Google should go after people who are good fits for your business and need fewer clicks to convert, compared to someone who might be at the start of their buying journey.
Remember that Performance Max sees many data points that we don’t, so you have to trust it a little bit.
Conversion values can also help by telling Google which cohorts are more important to your business. So if you know that certain locations have a higher average work order value, you might tell the system that those are x times more valuable than the average lead due to how much they spend with you.
Google will then prioritize getting you more of those leads, which is especially useful if you choose to use Maximize Conversion Value (with or without a target ROAS).
Landing page experience
Landing pages are only growing more and more important in influencing the conversion journey, and it’s not only user behavior that reflects this. As of February 2025, a keyword’s Quality Score is now subject to penalties if your landing page experience is subpar, where you would simply miss out on those points before.
As a rule of thumb you should aim to:
- Optimize for mobile while keeping designs responsive across devices
- Test and iterate your most impactful elements
- Approach copy and design with the right mindset
- Deliver what the ad promised
- Use the first post-conversion moment to set expectations
Read more: How to craft a winning landing page experience
Performance Max may not always be the answer
While lead generation on Performance Max is more than viable, there are still times when it makes sense to stick with Search or other less AI-driven campaign:
- Having a limited budget and being unable to spend your way through Performance Max’s learning period
- Operating in a small niche where you might not get the 30 conversions a month needed to make this work
- Having a great track record with a single-channel campaign like Search that you don’t want to put at risk
- Being unable to access the brand’s CRM or other customer database, or otherwise being unable to pass qualified lead data to Google
In these situations, you can still get the advantages of Google’s machine learning by running smaller experiments, like switching to Smart Bidding or testing a high-converting keyword as Broad Match in its own ad group.
If budget is not a constraint and you want to see if there are opportunities to create demand rather than just capture it, an experimental Demand Gen campaign can put your services and products in front of potential new audiences without going down the complex path of CRM integration.
Whatever you do, don’t try to look for shortcuts.
