The consumer journey is constantly evolving and customers are engaging with businesses across an increasing number of channels. With this growing need to adapt and scale, more advertisers are turning to Google's AI to keep up with changes in consumer demand and capture new performance opportunities in real time.
Performance Max campaigns are a new way for advertisers to buy and optimize ads across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Google Maps. They complement keyword-based Search campaigns and use Google's AI to help you grow conversions and value across all of Google’s advertising channels and inventory from a single campaign. In fact, advertisers that use Performance Max campaigns in their account see an average increase of 13% total incremental conversions at a similar cost per action.1
Following strong results from the beta, we’re rolling out Performance Max to all advertisers around the world starting today. Retailers and advertisers with physical business locations should continue to use Smart Shopping and Local campaigns during this critical holiday season. Next year, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will both upgrade to Performance Max to help you access new inventory and increase sales.
Read the blog post for more details and to hear how brands like Allianz and Joybird are already driving better results with Performance Max campaigns.
Creating a Performance Max campaign allows you to advertise across all of Google’s ad channels and inventory so you can find new customers.
We know it can be tricky to get started with a new campaign type, so here are some important best practices to keep top-of-mind.
- Pick the conversion goals that matter to your business and set values for your conversions
Performance Max campaigns center around the goals that matter to you. As a result, it’s important to identify what goals you want Performance Max campaigns to optimize towards and to report on the conversions that truly matter to your business. This allows the campaign to drive the full range of conversions you’re looking for, whether it’s increasing online sales, generating leads or growing offline sales.
You should also aim to set conversion values to reflect the relative importance of your goals. This helps Performance Max prioritize the types of conversions that are most valuable to your business. If many of your sales happen in the offline world, such as in your store or over the phone, use offline conversion imports to share this information with Google Ads and better optimize for these final sales. If you’re a lead gen advertiser, indicating which leads actually result in sales will help Performance Max drive higher lead quality across channels.
- Choose the right budget and bid strategy
Based on your goals, Performance Max uses Smart Bidding to set the right bids in real time for every auction and help you drive better results from your marketing budget. If you’re tracking different values with your conversions, use Maximize conversion value as your bid strategy to drive as much conversion value as possible within your budget. If you have specific ROI goals, you can also add a ROAS target. On the other hand, if you’re not tracking values and care about all your conversions equally, use Maximize conversions to drive as many conversions as possible, with the option to add a specific CPA target.
- Keep Final URL expansion on to drive more conversions on relevant search queries
Our new Final URL Expansion feature helps you find new, converting search queries that may not be already covered by your keyword-based Search campaigns. It uses relevant landing pages on your website to match you to relevant queries and to dynamically customize headlines for your ads. Performance Max campaigns won't match to search queries that exactly match keywords that are already in your Search campaigns, but they will serve in other auctions where they have a higher Ad Rank to help deliver incremental value.
- Upload a variety of creative assets to your asset group
By complementing your Search campaigns with Performance Max, you can engage audiences with relevant ad experiences across more channels. You’ll want to group assets by common or unified themes in your asset groups, just like you would with ad groups in other campaign types. Provide as many text, image and video assets as you can to help you show up on as much inventory as possible. Google's AI also performs better when it has a variety of assets to work with to find the right combinations. If you don’t have a video available, Performance Max can auto-generate a high-quality video for you using your existing assets. Check out these creative best practices for more information on how to get the most out of your performance marketing creative.
- Add audience signals to indicate which audiences are more likely to convert
Audience signals provide Google's AI with important information to help your campaign ramp up and optimize performance faster, while helping you uncover new converting customer segments that you may not have known about before. The most helpful audience signals to provide are your data, which includes Customer Match and website visitors lists, and custom segments.
For more tips on setting up and getting the most out of your Performance Max campaigns, visit the Google Ads Help Center and check out our best practices guide and video.
Posted by Tal Akabas, Sr. Product Manager, Performance Max campaigns
1. Google Data, Global, Ads, July - September 2021