Performance Max is Google’s campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and Discover from one set of assets, with the targeting decided by Google rather than by you.
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For cleaning companies that is either useful or expensive, and which one depends almost entirely on whether you set it up so Google knows what a good outcome looks like.
The short answer
It works for cleaning companies that already have conversion tracking in place and enough monthly volume for the system to learn from. It burns money for companies that do not.
That is not a hedge. Performance Max optimises toward whatever you tell it to count. If you count form fills, it will find you people who fill in forms, including tyre-kickers comparing prices on a one-off deep clean. If you count booked recurring jobs, it finds a different and much better person. If you count nothing, it spends your budget spreading impressions and reports success.
Why cleaning is a harder case than most trades
Two things make this category awkward.
The value spread is enormous. A one-off move-out clean and a weekly commercial contract are both “a cleaning lead”. One is worth a couple of hundred dollars once. The other is worth thousands a year. If both count as one conversion, the system optimises toward the cheaper and more common one, which is the wrong one.
Intent is shallow at the top. A lot of cleaning searches are price research rather than buying. Broad automated targeting picks up plenty of that.
Both problems have the same fix: tell Google which conversions are worth more, using values rather than counts.
What it costs
According to published benchmark data for home services in 2026, cost-per-click on cleaning and janitorial terms generally sits in the low single digits, with commercial and contract terms costing more than residential one-offs. On a working setup, cost per booked job commonly lands somewhere between $30 and $120 depending on your market and which service you are selling.
I ran the numbers on this properly for the retainer side in Google Ads for cleaning companies cost, which is the page most people actually want when they land here.
The four setup mistakes that waste the budget
No conversion values. The single biggest one. Assign a value to each conversion type: a recurring commercial enquiry should be worth many times a one-off residential quote request. Without values, the campaign optimises for volume and you get the cheap end.
Running it before you have data. Performance Max learns. With very few conversions a month there is nothing to learn from, and it defaults to spending broadly. Start with standard Search on your highest-intent terms, get the tracking working, then move.
Feeding it weak assets. It builds its own combinations from whatever you supply. Generic stock images of a mop and three lines of copy produce generic results across the network.
Leaving brand traffic in. People searching your company name were already yours. Exclude the brand terms or the reported cost per conversion will look wonderful and mean nothing.
When to use standard Search instead
If you are spending under roughly a thousand a month, or you have no tracking yet, or you only want commercial contracts rather than residential work, a tight Search campaign on high-intent terms will usually beat Performance Max and it is far easier to see what is happening inside it.
Performance Max earns its place once volume is there and the tracking is honest.
The thing that decides it either way
Speed of response. A client of mine in a different trade discovered their real problem was not the campaign at all: half their enquiries arrived after five in the afternoon and nobody called back until the next morning. The ad spend was fine. The follow-up was losing the jobs.
Before changing campaign type, find out how long an enquiry waits before somebody speaks to a human. If it is more than an hour, fix that first and you will get more out of the budget you already spend.
If you want a straight read on whether Performance Max suits your setup, book a free 30-minute call and I will tell you honestly if standard Search is the better answer for now.
