Performance Max Demographics:
The Google Ads Update We’ve Been Waiting For
If you run Performance Max campaigns, there’s a new Google Ads feature you’ll want to pay attention to.
Google is finally rolling out demographic and audience reporting for Performance Max campaigns, and from an optimisation perspective, this is a pretty big deal.
We’re already seeing the update appear in a large chunk of the accounts we manage, so there’s a good chance it’s either already landed in your account or will very soon.
To check whether you’ve got access yet, head to:
Performance Max campaign → Audiences, Keywords & Content
Simple enough. But the implications of this update are far more interesting.
Why Performance Max Demographics Matter
Until now, Performance Max campaigns have felt a little bit like flying blind when it came to demographics.
Yes, we’ve been able to apply demographic exclusions like age and gender for quite a while. But campaign-level demographic performance data? That’s been missing.
Which meant advertisers were often making decisions without actually being able to see how different demographic groups were performing.
Now we can.
This new visibility gives advertisers another optimisation lever to pull, particularly for lead generation businesses where lead quality matters just as much as conversion volume.
How We’d Approach Performance Max Demographics
Before everyone gets too excited and starts excluding demographics left, right and centre, a gentle word of caution.
As with any optimisation decision inside Google Ads, context matters.
A demographic segment having a rough week doesn’t automatically mean it should be excluded forever. Performance Max campaigns still rely heavily on machine learning and broader audience exploration, so reacting too quickly on limited data can sometimes hurt performance more than help it.
Instead, we’d recommend:
- Reviewing data over a longer timeframe
- Looking for consistent patterns, not short-term fluctuations
- Testing exclusions carefully and documenting any changes you make
And importantly, revisit those exclusions during peak periods. Consumer behaviour shifts dramatically during sales events and seasonal periods, so something that underperformed previously may suddenly become profitable again.
Audience Exclusions: Proceed Carefully
Some accounts are also beginning to show audience exclusions within Performance Max.
This is interesting, but we’d approach it with caution.
Audience signals still play a meaningful role in guiding Google’s machine learning. Excluding audiences too aggressively may limit the campaign’s ability to find converting users outside your initial assumptions.
In other words: just because you can exclude something doesn’t always mean you should.
The Bigger Picture
This update is another example of Google slowly giving advertisers more transparency inside Performance Max campaigns, which has been a major frustration point for many marketers.
The more visibility we have into what’s actually happening inside campaigns, the better decisions we can make.
And better decisions are what ultimately lead to more profitable Google Ads accounts.
At our agency, this kind of data analysis and optimisation work is exactly what we live and breathe. It’s also something we teach extensively inside our 12-week Google Ads course, Profitable Promotion, where we help marketers and business owners learn how to confidently interpret account data and optimise campaigns strategically rather than emotionally.
