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This guide covers everything HireOtto can do with PMax: creating campaigns, managing asset groups, updating assets, managing signals, and reporting.

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Concepts worth understanding first

Asset group — the core unit of a PMax campaign. Each asset group contains a set of creative assets (headlines, images, logos) and optional signals. Google mixes and matches these assets to create ads. One campaign can have multiple asset groups, typically organised by product line, audience, or landing page. Signals — hints you give Google about who to target. Two types:
  • Audience signals — reusable audience lists from your account (remarketing lists, customer match, similar audiences)
  • Search themes — keyword-like text strings that tell Google what searches are relevant for this asset group. Not keywords — Google can serve beyond them, but they bias the algorithm.
Brand guidelines — an optional campaign-level setting that locks your business name and logos at the campaign level rather than the asset group level. When enabled, brand assets are shared across all asset groups in the campaign automatically. This affects what you need to provide when adding a new asset group (you won’t need to re-supply logos and business name — they’re inherited).

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What HireOtto can do for Performance Max

Use HireOtto to:
  • Create Performance Max campaigns
  • Add and update asset groups
  • Upload and reuse image, logo, headline, and description assets
  • Manage audience signals
  • Add or remove search themes
  • Review asset group strength
  • Pull PMax search terms, placements, feed type, and asset reports

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Creating a PMax campaign

One step creates everything: the budget, the campaign, the first asset group, and optional signals. Required assets:
  • 3–15 headlines (≤ 30 characters each)
  • 1 long headline (≤ 90 characters)
  • 2–5 descriptions (≤ 90 characters each)
  • Business name
  • At least 1 landscape marketing image (URL)
  • At least 1 square marketing image (URL)
  • At least 1 logo (URL)
  • Final URL (landing page)
Minimum viable prompt:
With bidding and location targeting:
Bidding options: Maximise Conversions (with optional target CPA) or Maximise Conversion Value (with optional target ROAS). No other bidding strategies are available for PMax. With audience signals and search themes (recommended):
To find available audience IDs before creating:
With brand guidelines enabled: Brand guidelines lock your business name and logos at the campaign level. When enabled, all asset groups in the campaign inherit these brand assets automatically — you won’t need to supply them again when adding more asset groups later.
Note: landscape logo is optional for standard campaigns but worth providing when enabling brand guidelines — it becomes a campaign-level brand asset used across all placements.

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Adding a second asset group

Add asset groups to an existing PMax campaign to segment by product, audience, or landing page. Standard campaign (no brand guidelines):
Brand-guidelines-enabled campaign: Business name and logos are already attached at the campaign level — don’t re-supply them. HireOtto handles this automatically.

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Reviewing existing campaigns and asset groups

List all PMax campaigns:
List asset groups in a campaign:
List all assets attached to an asset group:
This returns asset resource names — you’ll need these for remove operations or when reusing assets across groups. List signals on an asset group:
Returns current audience signals and search themes, with their signal resource names — needed for removal. List campaign-level brand assets (brand-guidelines campaigns only):
Returns business name, logo, and landscape logo assets linked at the campaign level, including asset resource names and image dimensions.

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Updating asset group status

Pause, enable, or remove an asset group without touching the campaign:

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Adding new assets to an existing asset group

Use this when you want to upload and attach new creative — new image URLs, new headlines, etc.
You can add multiple asset types in one prompt.

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Reusing existing assets across asset groups

If the same image or text asset already exists in your account (uploaded to another asset group), you can attach it to a new asset group without re-uploading — this avoids creating duplicate assets in your library. You’ll need the asset resource names first:
Then attach them to another group:
HireOtto skips any assets that are already linked to the target asset group — no duplicates created. When to use this vs. adding new assets:
  • New URL or new creative → use add (creates and uploads)
  • Same asset already in your library → use attach (links existing, no duplicate)

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Removing assets from an asset group

You need the exact asset resource names to remove assets. Get them first:
Then remove:
HireOtto validates that the removal won’t leave the asset group below Google’s minimum asset requirements before proceeding.

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Managing audience signals

Add an audience signal:
To find available audiences first:
Remove an audience signal: You need the signal resource name, not the audience ID. Get it first:
Then remove:

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Managing search themes

Add search themes:
Search themes are plain text — write them like keyword phrases, not as match-type keywords. They’re signals, not targeting constraints. Remove a search theme: Get the signal resource name first:
Then remove:

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Reporting

PMax has eight dedicated reports. Because Google doesn’t expose keyword-level data for PMax, these reports are your primary diagnostic tools.

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Campaign performance

Overall metrics: impressions, clicks, conversions, cost, ROAS.

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Asset group performance

Breaks down metrics per asset group — useful for comparing performance across segments.

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Asset group strength

Ad strength score and action items per asset group. No date range needed — this reflects current state.
What to look for: any asset group rated “Poor” or “Good” (not “Excellent”) will have specific action items. Addressing them — adding more headlines, improving image variety — directly improves Performance.

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Asset-level performance

Metrics per individual asset (each headline, image, description). Shows which creative is performing and which isn’t.
For large asset libraries, export to CSV:

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Top asset combinations

Shows the actual asset combinations Google is serving most — which headlines are appearing with which images and descriptions.
No date range needed. Use this to understand what Google is favouring and whether it aligns with your messaging.

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Search terms report

Queries that triggered your PMax ads. One of the most valuable reports — helps identify wasted spend and negative keyword candidates.
Terms with spend and zero conversions are candidates for negatives. Add them at the campaign level:

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Campaign placements

Where your PMax ads are showing — websites, apps, YouTube channels.
Use this to identify low-quality placement categories or specific sites/apps burning budget.

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Campaign feed types

Breaks down performance by feed type (product feeds, store feeds, etc.). Relevant if your PMax campaign uses a Google Merchant Center feed.
For non-PMax campaign reporting, see Analyze Google Ads performance reports with AI.

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Typical PMax audit sequence

For an existing PMax campaign, this sequence gives you a full picture:
Start with asset strength — it tells you where to focus. Then search terms for waste. Then asset performance and combinations to understand what creative is working.

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Full creation sequence (copy-paste)

Replace all placeholders before running: