• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Google has introduced new features to boost performance and streamline ad management, including campaign-level negative keyword lists for Performance Max campaigns, expanded search theme limits from 25 to 50 per asset group, and enhanced reporting capabilities.

Through a variety of features announced Thursday, advertisers can now more easily manage brand suitability and exclusions, target devices by hardware and demographics, and access search term performance data, with a new beta option for demographic gender exclusions.

Search traffic performance has been the goal of Performance Max for brands, so negative keywords are not always needed, but still improve the ability to determine who sees an advertiser’s ad and where it appears.

More traffic across its search engine and to publisher sites supports online advertising.

Google launched campaign-level negative keywords for Performance Max across Search and Shopping inventory earlier this year. Now the company has added the ability to apply campaign-level negative keyword lists to Performance Max campaigns. This makes managing exclusions across multiple campaigns easier.

Let’s say a retailer selling luxury goods creates one list to exclude terms like “cheap” or “bargain” and applies it to multiple campaigns simultaneously. This ensures brand suitability without having to manually update negative keywords in each campaign.

Customer acquisition reporting has become clearer in Performance Max, Search, and Shopping campaigns. Advertisers previously might have seen conversions labeled as “Unknown” when segmenting lifecycle goals reporting by new vs. returning customers. The ability to estimate whether an “Unknown” customer is a new or existing customer has been improved, so advertisers no longer see “Unknown” conversions in reporting.

Increasing visibility and control in Google Performance Max also has become a focus for Google. Diagnostics and recommendations were added today—all based on the status of an advertiser’s campaign goal and conversion setup. The aim is to help identify goal-related issues in Performance Max campaign.

These tools can resolve issues that have been identified, such as missing or broken tags, goals, and conversion actions that impact performance of campaigns.