Google is kicking off 2025 with a suite of new Performance Max (PMAX) features designed to give advertisers in South Africa greater control, deeper insights, and improved campaign results. These enhancements build on the momentum of 2024, offering businesses the ability to fine-tune their advertising strategies by leveraging Google’s AI across multiple platforms in a single campaign.
More control, better targeting
One of the most significant updates is the rollout of campaign-level negative keywords, a long-requested feature that enables advertisers to exclude specific terms, ensuring brand suitability and reducing wasted ad spend. This level of control is crucial for businesses aiming to refine their targeting and maintain relevance across Google’s vast advertising network.
Additionally, a new customer acquisition goal with high-value mode allows advertisers to prioritise high-value users based on their potential lifetime value. By using Customer Match, businesses can specify and target high-value customers, with campaign-level reporting offering insights into both new and high-value customer acquisition.
For retailers using product feeds, Google now provides granular brand exclusion controls across Search and Shopping ads, allowing businesses to tailor their ad strategies with greater precision. Another key enhancement includes “URL contains” rules, which enable more refined targeting based on page categories within a website, further optimising Performance Max campaigns.
AI steering and search reporting
Google’s AI-driven advertising tools are becoming more transparent and customisable. Search themes, which allow advertisers to specify relevant search queries, are now officially launching with improved reporting. The updates include:
- A search terms insights source column to differentiate between keywordless targeting and added search themes.
- A search themes usefulness indicator to assess how well provided search themes drive incremental traffic.
- Improved asset group reporting, allowing advertisers to segment and download performance data by device, time, and other relevant metrics.
“We are acutely aware of the ever-changing commercial landscape and recognise that businesses desire tools that not only put them directly in the driver’s 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, a Google spokesperson.
Enhanced visuals and AI-generated content
Another major update is the expansion of AI-generated images across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, and App campaigns. Advertisers can now create engaging, high-quality visuals—including lifestyle images featuring people and faces—using text-based prompts. To ensure ethical AI use, Google has implemented SynthID watermarking for AI-generated images, alongside strict content safeguards to prevent inappropriate visuals.
Google is also rolling out asset-audience recommendations, which suggest ways to improve image effectiveness based on AI-driven insights, streamlining asset creation for advertisers.
What this means for South African businesses
Originally launched in late 2020 and made available to all advertisers in 2021, Performance Max has become a key tool for digital marketers looking to maximise reach across platforms like YouTube, Search, Display, and Shopping. With these latest upgrades, South African businesses can expect better targeting, more detailed reporting, and a broader reach—all within a single, AI-powered campaign.
For businesses looking to stay ahead in the evolving digital advertising landscape, these enhancements present an opportunity to fine-tune their strategies and extract greater value from their marketing spend.
For more details on the latest Performance Max updates, read the official Google Ads blog post by Tal Akabas, Director of Product Management, Google Ads.