Asset Groups

An asset group is the Performance Max equivalent of an ad group, a themed bundle of headlines, images, videos, and other assets plus an audience signal, built around a single theme or product line.

You move from regular Search into Performance Max and the familiar structure disappears. There are no keywords to pull on and no ad groups in the old sense. What you get instead is the asset group, a collection of creative built around one theme, which Google mixes into ads that run across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps, and Discover.

You fill each asset group with headlines, long headlines, descriptions, images, logos, and videos, then attach an audience signal to point the system at the kind of people you expect to convert. Google assembles the pieces and decides who sees what, but the group is the container you actually control. You can run several asset groups in one campaign, and each one can carry its own theme and its own creative.

Worth being honest here. Asset groups are one of the only real structural levers Performance Max gives you, so wasting them costs you dearly. Split them by theme, by product line, or by margin, so you can read what is working and shift budget toward it, instead of dumping every image and headline into one giant group where everything blurs together and you throw away the little control you had left.

In Performance Max, the asset group is your steering wheel, so hold it.