How to Structure Asset Groups for PMax Campaigns Properly

Whenever Google releases a new feature like Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, new winning strategies quickly emerge. An example is some „experts” who recommend creating a separate asset group for each audience.

In this post I show you why this tip is wrong and how to divide your PMax campaigns into asset groups sensibly.

Your key takeaways

• Division by themes, not by audiences: Asset groups should be thematically distinguishable (product subcategories, benefits, features). Audience division is wrong because audience signals are only hints, not real targeting.
• Minimum equipment per asset group: 15 Headlines, 10 Descriptions, 20 Images, 5 Logos, 5 Videos. Below that, asset evaluation is weak and Google delivers less broadly.
• Up to 50 Search Themes per asset group (limit raised from 25 to 50 in 2025).

How exactly this can look in practice is in the post. Let’s go.

By the way: Click here for a detailed guide to Performance Max campaigns.

What are asset groups in Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max campaigns have a different structure than normal Google Search or Shopping campaigns. The familiar Campaign > Ad Group > Ad structure doesn’t apply here.

PMax campaigns have no ad groups and ads, but asset groups that enable targeting and ad design at a single level.

For each asset group, you can store creative materials (assets), products from your feed, and audience signals.

How do assets work?

PMax campaigns work by you providing Google with as many assets as possible. These are called assets. The algorithm combines them to achieve the best possible performance.

You can store texts, images, and videos. Google generates a variety of different ad combinations.

What asset types exist?

Text Assets

• Headlines (max. 30 chars): Up to 15 different, at least 3 required.
• Long Headlines (max. 90 chars): Up to 5.
• Short Description (max. 60 chars): At least 1 required.
• Descriptions (max. 90 chars): Up to 4 long descriptions.
• Business Name: For verified accounts.
• URL: Exactly 1 destination URL per asset group.

Image Assets

• Images: Up to 20 different images in 1.91:1, 1:1, 4:5.
• Logos: Various company logos in 1:1 or 4:1.

Video Assets

Up to 5 videos in 3 formats:

• Vertical: 9:16
• Square: 1:1
• Horizontal: 16:9

Asset minimums per asset group

For meaningful evaluation and stable performance, Google needs sufficient material per asset group:

• 15 Headlines
• 10 Descriptions
• 20 Images (Landscape and Square)
• 5 Logos
• 5 Videos

If you’re below that, many asset evaluations remain „Pending” or „Not enough data”. For structure decisions, this is an important lower limit: rather few well-equipped asset groups than many half-empty ones. How to evaluate assets, find in the article PMax Asset Performance Analysis.

How do audience signals work?

For each asset group, you can define audience signals. These serve the Google algorithm as hints about who the right audience is for your asset group’s offer.

Important: Audience signals don’t constitute real targeting. All you can do here is give the algorithm a head start.

The algorithm will go beyond the boundaries of the defined signals to find users with high conversion probability.

The following signals can be stored:

• Search Themes (up to 50 per asset group, raised from 25 in 2025)
• Customer Match Lists (particularly strong)
• Custom audiences
• Retargeting audiences
• Demographic properties

Important to know: Search Themes apply per asset group, not per campaign. The limit was raised from 25 to 50 per asset group in 2025. This makes theme-based segmentation more scalable. You can build separate theme sets per assortment area or audience variant.

More in the article PMax Audience Signals.

How do Listing Groups work?

Listing Groups are only relevant in e-commerce. With them, you can assign individual products or product categories to the asset groups.

This way, you can ensure that your texts, images, and videos match the advertised products. This leads to better ads and an optimized CTR.

Tip: When creating asset groups, you can only select the top categories of your category tree or individual properties like the product ID. In many cases, that’s not yet sufficient. If you want to narrow down products further, you can do that anytime via Listing Groups.

By the way: In another post, I’ve collected all the important points to optimize Performance Max campaigns.

How to structure asset groups properly?

By what criteria should one divide a PMax campaign into asset groups? Here’s an approach that has proven itself:

Performance Max campaigns should be divided into thematically distinct asset groups. These can be subcategories or different benefits/features of the advertised product.

The distinction of the individual asset groups happens via different ad texts, images, and videos, not different audience signals.

That doesn’t mean you can’t address different audiences with different asset groups. But this addressing should primarily be based on different ads.

Important: Since the algorithm goes beyond the boundaries of audience signals, it’s not sensible to divide asset groups only by these.

In e-commerce, you can also use Listing Groups to select only products of the corresponding subcategories per asset group.

Example

E-commerce shop for clothing

Let’s say you have a fashion online shop and a Performance Max campaign for your women’s jackets. It’s worth creating a separate asset group for each subcategory. This way you can run more relevant ads for specific search queries like „denim jackets”.

Most users know quite specifically what they want. The goal should always be to achieve the best possible relevance.

Asset group structure (example):

PMAX Women’s Jackets

• Jackets General
• Coats
• Winter Jackets
• Light Jackets
• Denim Jackets
• Corduroy Jackets

Online Marketing Agency

Another example: you want to advertise your Google Ads service. In this case, there are no different products, but different aspects you can highlight in the asset groups.

Asset group structure (example):

PMAX Google Ads Service

• Google Ads General
• Search Campaigns
• Display Campaigns
• YouTube Campaigns
• Google Ads for Lead Generation
• Google Ads for Online Shops

How many asset groups per campaign?

There’s no ideal number of asset groups. How many you create depends on how many sensible subcategories there are with matching texts, images, videos, and destination URLs.

In my experience, you shouldn’t get too granular. Otherwise, the individual asset groups receive too few impressions.

In most cases, it’s between 3-15 asset groups.

Sometimes one asset group is enough.

If you’d reach far more than 15 asset groups, consider whether you’d rather split the topic into 2 different campaigns.

Asset group limits in Google Ads

Every Performance Max campaign must contain at least one asset group. You can manage a maximum of 100 different active asset groups per campaign. As discussed, it’s not recommended to aim for this magnitude.

How asset groups work, 3 things to consider

1. Optimization: check Asset Details

Performance Max gives one few control levers for optimization. The assets of your asset groups are one of them. The quality of your assets determines the quality of your ads.

It’s not enough to define assets once and never look at them again. Regularly check which of your texts, images, and videos perform well or poorly.

More: PMax Asset Performance Analysis.

Advantage since 2026: Search Terms are now visible per asset group. If the search terms in an asset group don’t match the asset set, that’s a hint at a mismatch. More: Analyze PMax Campaigns.

2. Remarketing works across all assets

PMax campaigns also act as a dynamic remarketing campaign. Here it’s important to understand that Google performs remarketing across all asset groups (and even campaigns).

This can lead to occasionally seeing search terms in the Insights reports that don’t quite fit. You can’t avoid this behavior, no matter how well you separated the asset groups.

3. Google prefers broader asset groups

From experience, the Google algorithm prefers broad asset groups. Asset groups with a broader theme and more products (for e-commerce campaigns).

It’s still worth dividing your asset groups according to the guide in this post, since you improve ad relevance. The more broadly defined asset groups will get most of the budget, however.

Conclusion: With the right structure to success

Asset creation and structure is one of the few ways to influence the success of your PMax campaigns. I hope I could help you with this post.

You should be aware that the right asset structure is no guarantee for PMax success. It’s just one of many puzzle pieces that needs to be right for Google’s AI machine to automatically deliver results.

Of course, I wish you maximum performance.

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