Performance Max creative: how to build assets that get served

What Performance Max does with your image after you upload it

Performance Max is one campaign feeding seven surfaces: Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. What you upload is a pile of parts rather than a finished ad. Google assembles a different ad for each surface, cropping and rescaling your images to whatever that placement needs.

The floor for a servable asset group is one landscape image and one square image. Hitting only the floor is the most common mistake in the format, because eligibility for a placement depends on owning an asset that fits it. No portrait image means almost no vertical inventory. No video means Google builds one from your images and runs that instead.

• Images must be JPG or PNG and under 5 MB
• One landscape plus one square image is the minimum to serve, not a target
• Portrait assets are what open up vertical placements on YouTube and Discover
• Google crops every image per placement and does not ask first

The asset checklist for one asset group

The three ratios are fixed, and each has a recommended size worth hitting rather than scraping the minimum. Uploading at minimum resolution gives Google nothing to work with when it rescales for a large placement.

An asset group holds up to 20 images shared across the three ratios, plus five logos and five videos. Text has its own ceilings: three to fifteen headlines at 30 characters, up to five long headlines at 90 characters, and up to five descriptions at 90 characters.

• Landscape: 1.91:1, 1200 x 628 recommended, 600 x 314 minimum
• Square: 1:1, 1200 x 1200 recommended, 300 x 300 minimum
• Portrait: 4:5, 960 x 1200 recommended, 480 x 600 minimum
• Square logo at 1200 x 1200, landscape logo at 4:1 and 1200 x 300
• Fill the headline slots too, since Google pairs text and images independently per placement

Design for the crop, not the canvas

Google keeps the center 80 percent of an image and treats the outer band as expendable. Anything you actually need read, the product, a face, a price, the logo, has to sit inside that center area, or it will survive in one placement and get sliced in the next.

Overlaid text causes the second round of damage. Google's policy keeps overlay under roughly 20 percent of the image area and rules out baked-in buttons that imitate real ad interface. Google also recommends uploading at least one image per ratio with no overlay at all, because overlay text stops being legible the moment the image is scaled down into a small Display slot.

This is why exporting one master file at three sizes rarely works. A landscape composition squeezed into 4:5 either crops the subject or strands it in the middle of the frame with dead space above and below. The ratios need separate compositions of the same idea.

• Keep the subject, price and logo inside the center 80 percent
• Stay under 20 percent text overlay and skip fake CTA buttons
• Upload at least one clean, overlay-free image in every ratio
• Use a square logo, and avoid a mostly white logo on transparency, since it can render on a white background
• Recompose per ratio instead of resizing a single file

One theme per asset group

An asset group is a creative unit and works best when it covers one thing: a product line, a service, an audience, or a single offer. Mixed groups produce muddy reporting, because you cannot tell which theme earned the conversions and which one rode along.

A campaign can hold up to 100 asset groups, and asset groups cannot be shared between campaigns. Almost nobody needs 100. Start with one group per landing page and split further only when a theme is big enough to deserve its own creative and its own search themes.

• One product line, service, audience or offer per group
• Match each asset group to the page it sends traffic to
• Give each group its own images rather than recycling one shared pool
• Split a group when you can write genuinely different headlines for the halves

Read the asset report without overreacting

Google labels each asset Low, Good or Best based on how it contributed to conversions relative to the other assets in the same group. The label ranks assets against their siblings. An asset can be perfectly good and still come out Low because two better ones sit next to it, and if you delete every Low asset, the next report will promote new ones into that slot.

Reporting is much better than it used to be. Channel reporting breaks results out across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and asset-level metrics now include impressions, clicks, cost, conversions and conversion value rather than only the performance label. That is enough to answer questions that used to be guesswork, like whether your portrait images are doing anything at all.

Ad Strength rates quantity, variety and quality of assets together, and Google reports that asset groups reaching Excellent see around 6 percent more conversions on average. Treat it as a completeness check rather than a score to game. Padding a group with near duplicates raises the rating without changing what runs.

• Low means outranked inside that group, not unusable
• Check channel reporting before blaming the creative for weak volume
• Change one or two assets at a time so the next report is readable
• Give a new asset enough impressions to earn a label before judging it

A production routine that keeps groups full

Three ratios times four themes is twelve images before you have tested anything, and that is the version where each concept exists once. Add an overlay-free variant and you are at 24. Most teams stall here. The specs are easy enough to follow once, and then the volume defeats them.

The routine that works is to brief by concept instead of by file. Decide the idea, then produce all three ratios of it in the same pass so the crops are deliberate rather than salvaged. Aduarius fits at that step: you write the brief once, pick a style, and get the square, vertical and horizontal versions of the same idea together, with the headline placed on the creative when a placement calls for one. Then set a monthly habit of replacing the two weakest assets in each group rather than rebuilding everything at once.

• Brief by concept, not by file
• Produce all three ratios of a concept in one pass
• Keep an overlay-free version of every concept on file
• Retire the two weakest assets per group each month
• Refresh headlines on the same schedule, since text carries as much of the ad as the image