Performance Max, or PMax, puts AI behind the wheel to drive customers to hotel websites and increase direct bookings. To be successful, hoteliers must understand how to use PMax to its full potential by guiding ad placements and audience targets.
NB: This is an article from Travelboom
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This AI-powered tool’s advanced automation, powerful bidding strategies and enhanced reporting may take some time to master. But your efforts aren’t lost: according to Google, PMax drives incremental conversions and advertisers can, on average, achieve 18% more conversions at a similar cost. If you’re ready to start, read this breakdown of PMax features and how to guide its AI controls to maximize your results.
New PMax Features for 2025
Google announced changes for PMax in 2025, and hotels should use the new brand guidelines, negative keyword functions and Demand Gen campaign format to improve campaign performance. We incorporated these latest PMax features into the guide below, but here are the highlights:
- Brand Guidelines: All PMax campaigns for hotels will require business names and logo assets to improve brand consistency across PPC ad placements. This presents an excellent opportunity for hoteliers to update — or verify the quality of — brand creatives for maximum impact.
- Negative Keywords: Google added negative keywords directly to PMax campaigns, giving hotel marketers increased control over where their PPC ads will appear and reducing irrelevant placements.
- Video Action Campaigns: Video Action campaigns will transition to Demand Gen campaigns, expanding ads that were solely focused on YouTube to Discovery and Gmail placements for a more audience-driven experience.
Guiding PMax Campaigns
PMax uses AI to streamline ad placement and find cost-effective locations across Google’s platforms, from Search to Hotel Ads and Gmail. This doesn’t mean that you can’t influence PMax for hotels, though. Hoteliers can strategically set campaign goals and signals to guide PPC ad targeting through:
- Campaign Goals: Select an advertising objective to steer Google’s automated system to optimize toward.
- Audience Signals: Add audience suggestions to help Google AI optimize ads for your target guest and selected goals; improvements for segmentation tools will enhance personalization across channels.
- Exclude Audience Segments: Make unrelated or unprofitable segments off-limits to increase qualified traffic.
- Negative Keywords: Add terms to your campaigns to alert Google which terms — such as ‘cheap’ or ‘luxury’ — you do not want your property to show for.
Enhancing PMax Performance Tracking
Though Performance Max uses AI to optimize bids and placements, hoteliers still must analyze the metrics to understand the tool’s decision-making and look for opportunities to optimize with audience segments and signals. PMax offers placement reports and insights on rising search trends, but marketers may prefer to use external tools to gather more comprehensive data. As you fine-tune PMax for hotels, explore analytics solutions to strengthen actionable insights.
