Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns Best Practices

Google shares best practices for optimizing Performance Max campaigns following an expanded rollout to all advertisers.

Google Ads Performance Max campaigns are now available to everyone. Here’s what you need to know about driving more conversions with this new campaign type.

Performance Max campaigns are a new way for advertisers to buy and optimize ads across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Google Maps.

This campaign type launched in beta last year as a compliment to keyword-based Google Search campaigns.

Following the success of the beta, Google is rolling out Performance Max campaigns to all advertisers worldwide.

Keep reading to learn more about how this campaign type works and how to get the most out of it.

What is a Google Ads Performance Max Campaign?

A Performance Max campaign allows businesses to buy and optimize ads across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Google Maps.

Businesses utilizing this campaign type are able to promote themselves across all Google Ads inventory, leading to more customers and conversions.

Performance Max helps you achieve your goals in four main ways:

• Increasing conversions and value: Capitalize on conversion opportunities in real-time with automated bid adjustments.
• Finding new customers: Google’s real-time understanding of user intent, behavior, and context can help you target new audience segments with more relevant ads.
• Gaining richer insights: The Insights page now includes data on Performance Max campaigns.
• Working together with automation: Drive better results with automation by providing high-quality creative assets and information about which audiences are likely to convert.

Google says advertisers that use Performance Max campaigns in their account see an average increase of 13% total incremental conversions at a similar cost per action.

Performance Max offers a unique benefit for retailers and local businesses, as they have an opportunity to access ad inventory and formats not available with Smart Shopping or Local campaigns.

Businesses can now run local campaigns on channels like YouTube, Search, and Discover, which they weren’t able to do before.

Performance Max is such a superior option for retailers and local businesses that Google is scrapping Smart Shopping and Local campaigns next year.

Performance Max Best Practices

Here are some tips from Google for getting started with Performance Max campaigns:

• Identify goals: Decide which goals matter to your business and optimize your campaign to achieve them. Goals can include increasing online sales, generating leads, or growing offline sales.
• Set the right bidding strategy from the following options:
  • Smart Bidding: Automatically set bids based on your goals.
  • Maximize conversion value: Drive as much conversion value as possible within your budget.
  • Maximize conversions: Drive as many conversions as possible.
• Keep Final URL expansion on: A new feature called Final URL Expansion helps you find new, converting search queries that may not be already covered by your keyword-based Search campaigns.
• Upload a variety of creative assets: Provide as many text, image and video assets as you can. Automation performs better when it has a variety of assets to work with to find the right combinations.
• Add audience signals: The most helpful audience signals to provide are your data, which includes Customer Match and website visitors lists, and custom segments.

Upcoming Features In The Works

In the coming months Google will launch new features in Performance Max specifically for retailers and businesses with store locations.

The upcoming features will give businesses the option to optimize campaigns exclusively for new customer acquisition.

Retailers with a local inventory feed will see new Search and Maps ad formats powered by their products to help drive more foot traffic to stores.

Google plans to continue investing in Performance Max and improving its automation technology to help businesses achieve greater results.

Sources: Google Ads Help, Google Ads & Commerce Blog

Featured Image: Screenshot from support.google.com/google-ads, November 2021.