Google Ads is constantly offering better options for advertisers. One of these options is Performance Max Campaigns, which help advertisers improve their campaigns' performance by using artificial intelligence and marketing automation.
Learn everything you need to know about performance max campaigns and why they are so effective in advertising.
Performance Max campaigns are a new type of goal-based Google Ads campaign that allows advertisers to access all of their inventory from a single campaign.
Their primary goal is to maximize performance based on a specific conversion goal, and they target clients that are active across all Google channels, such as YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. They combine Google's automation technologies across all aspects of campaigns, including – bidding, budget optimization, audiences, and creatives.
As announced by Google, Local and Smart Shopping campaigns can now be upgraded to Performance Max to access additional inventory and formats on YouTube, Search Text Ads, and Discover. Shopping or Local campaigns will no longer be available from July 2022. . From September onwards, all campaigns that have not been manually converted to Performance Max will be automatically switched over.
Performance Max allows you to accelerate the speed at which you achieve results, as the entire strategy is based on reaching your marketing objectives.
Google Ads recommends that advertisers use top-performing campaigns in the following cases:
In Google Ads' top-performing campaigns, all automation revolves around the objective, so selecting the most appropriate one for each case is the most important step.
The first thing to do is to select the main objective of your campaign from these options:
Sales: drive online, phone, or in-store sales.
Leads: get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action.
Website traffic: get qualified traffic to visit your website.
Product and brand consideration: encourage people to explore your products or services.
Brand awareness and reach: increase awareness of your brand among more users.
Promote an app: get more installs, interactions, and pre-registrations on an app.
Store visits and promotions: get users to visit your store in person.
You can also choose to create a campaign without a primary objective. It is important to note that you can only create a Performance Max campaign if you select Sales, Leads, Website Traffic, or No goals.
The next step is to define specific conversion goals for your campaign, e.g. calls, form submissions, or purchases.
Once you have defined your goals, choose Performance Max as your campaign type to access all Google Ads channels and inventory.
The bid strategy and budget for a Performance Max campaign should be in line with your overall business objectives. Here are the main options:
You can also add a cost per action (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) target if this helps you better measure your marketing results. You can use the average CPA or ROAS of the last 30 days in other campaigns as a starting point. The campaign might suggest a target amount based on your account history, but you can change this if you prefer.
Soon, Performance Max will have budget and target forecasts to help you with this step.
You will then need to select these settings:
As with other Google Ads campaigns, the quality and variety of your creatives is important when it comes to the success of your campaign. In Performance Max, you can create asset groups to manage different creatives, similar to ad groups in other types of campaigns.
Assets include the final URL or landing page, images, logos, videos, titles and descriptions, and a call to action. To optimize your campaigns, you can create different asset groups associated with a single theme. You can upload images from your computer, choose assets you have already used in previous campaigns or extract them from your website or YouTube channel. If you don't have videos, Performance Max will automatically create a high-quality video using your assets.
As part of its automation features, Performance Max automatically groups assets according to available formats that match your conversion goals. The more assets you have, the more ad formats there will be in the campaign and the more appealing it will be to users. In addition, this will give more options for automation and machine learning to generate better combinations.
With the audience signals feature, you can tell Google which segments are likely to complete conversions or which ads best reach a particular audience.
Indicating audience signals can improve automated targeting and ensure that ads are shown to the most relevant audience. However, one of the best things about automation is that it helps you identify new conversion segments so you don't have to limit your ads to specific audiences.
Include ad extensions such as site links, featured text, callouts, or lead forms. This makes your ads stand out more and provides additional information to your potential customers.
Finally, before publishing your campaign, take a look at the Summary page to see if anything is missing or if there are any errors.
You are now ready to publish and take advantage of all the benefits of performance max campaigns.
These are the benefits of the reports that Google offers you for Maximum Performance campaigns:
To make it easier to understand, if you have created a Performance Max campaign focused on displaying products from your ecommerce and Google has shown the ads in Search, Shopping, and Display, you won't be able to tell which channel performed the best. Google keeps this information to itself and offers only the overall data. It is expected that over time, this will evolve and more detailed statistics will be available.