What is Google Performance Max?

The Google Performance Max is a machine learning automated goal-based campaign type. It’s an excellent solution for advertisers who want to maximize performance with their Google Ads account and get the most out of their budget. Google’s Performance Max is a goal-oriented automated marketing tool that uses artificial intelligence technology to offer an attractive advertisement with optimized bids during the period. With this program, you can choose your commercial objective and decide on a conversion strategy for it– all in one place! In this blog post, we will discuss what it is, how it works, and why you should use this new feature from Google!

Meet your goals & Marketing Objectives faster with Performance Max :

With Performance Max, you’ll find conversions where and when they happen with the help of automation. Our AI-powered software can automatically monitor your competitors’ websites for any new visitors that arrive as well as what pages those people land on after their visit; this way we get a better understanding of which strategies work best in terms of converting users into customers!

How do you Set Up Performance Max Campaigns?

Setting Up performance max is relatively straight forwards compared to previous Google Ads campaigns. You’ll need to select your marketing objective, which can be found under the “Campaigns” tab. After that, you will want to choose what conversion goals support the objective you selected in step one.

According to our friends at Google, Performance Max is best suited to the Leads Objective at the moment, with Retail and Online Sales still being developed and improved. This being said we have seen some great results when trying this on our Retail E-commerce Clients.

 

You will also need to determine the conversion goals that you want the Performance Max Campaigns and Google’s Machine Learning to Optimise towards. You can choose more than one but we have been told during BETA stage that it may be better to choose just 1 goal for Google to focus on.

 

Performance Max Marketing Budget

Once you have selected your Objective it’s time to determine your budget. Whilst Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns were in BETA mode, we were told to use the formula of (your Account Wide CPA X 10) to determine your budget for Performance Max Campaigns. Although it is probably wise to utilise this formula, we have also seen good results with smaller budgets to CPA Ratios of around 3X your account-wide Cost Per Conversion.

There are only 2 bid strategies available when using Performance Max Campaigns. One is Maximise Conversions and the other is Maximise Conversion Value. For Lead Gen type businesses we recommend Maximise Conversions and For Future E-commerce, we would say maximise conversion Value. You can also use Max Conversion Value as a Lead Generation Type Business but this would require you to assign Dollar Value to your Conversion Actions in Google Ads, such as Calls and Form Submissions.

 

Creative Assets

You can add a number of assets to your Performance Max. Including up to 15 Images, multiple logos, Up to 5 Videos that are uploaded into your YouTube Channel, Multiple written text headlines and descriptions. We always go by the rule of the more the merrier when it comes to creative assets as this gives Googles AI Learning to have more to play with and ultimately get to your desired results quicker.

Once upload all of your business creative assets, Google will automatically cycle your assets and serve the best combinations across Google Ads Inventory, to achieve your desired goals. There will be multiple ad formats and as much as there is a preview of some of the combinations, you will be left to put your trust in the Machine Learning system to work its magic from this point on.

Text Ads

• 3 x 30 character headline
• 2 x 90 character descriptions
• 1 x 90 character headline

Images

• 1 x 600×316 landscape
• 1 x 300×300 square
• 1 x 314×314 square (for campaigns with Store Visits goal)
• 1 x 128×128 logo

Recommended: 1200 × 628 – Max file size: 5,120KB

Video (Recommended, but optional)

10 seconds in length

 

From this point, Google will serve your ads on the full inventory shown in the image below. Keyword-based search campaigns, Google Display Network, Discovery Ads, Gmail and YouTube. If you link your Feed then performance max will show in Google Shopping Ad Inventory.

Local Store Visits Campaigns are not yet part of the inventory as far as we know, but we fully expect this to be rolled out in early 2022 if it hasn’t been already.

 

Audience Signals

Audience Signals allows advertisers to influence automation by directly indicating the audiences that are most relevant and have the highest likelihood of conversion.

Audiences can be identified with Google’s proprietary technology, which is designed for speed as well as steering automated targeting based on best practices from both human-initiated campaigns or data derived through machine learning algorithms like Deep neural networks (DNNs).

Using First party Audiences such as Previous converters with a mix of Googles Pre-set Affinity and In-market audiences is recommended with audience signals. If you are not sure what to use you can simply use the search bar and find the best Audience that suits your business and marketing objective.

 

Before going live and publishing your campaign, you will be able to see a summary of your Campaign settings. The key here is to check your settings to ensure everything lines up. Especially your Campaign Goals, Budget and Bidding Strategy.

 

Why use Performance Max Campaigns?

We’ll use automation to efficiently acquire customers you’re currently missing across valuable inventory on the Google Ads network. If you are testing and see great results, move budgets over from other campaigns or place them in Performance Max exclusively for a complementary boost – but don’t forget that giving Search keywords their due attention is key when it comes to getting both benefits!

There are rumours that due to Performance Max role out this year, Google may be saying goodbye to some of their leading products, such as Smart Shopping and Local Campaigns some point next year.

Optimizing Performance Max Campaigns

Firstly let us mention that you need to wait 2-3 weeks before making any knee jerk decisions on a Performance max campaign. The main area for optimising Performance Max Campaigns is your Creative Assets. Making Sure your Headlines, Vides and Image Assets are on point and the offer you are marketing is attractive is key to success. You’ll also want to monitor the Landing Pages you are sending your traffic to and make sure these pages are converting well.

You can also utilise exclusions such as content type and Placement exclusions.

Lastly, another way to optimise Google Ads Performance Max campaigns is to look at your conversion settings and the goals you are optimising. If your performance max isn’t working after 3-4 weeks then maybe look at changing the goals you are optimising towards. For example, an add to cart conversion may be easier to optimise towards, rather than a final purchase. You can adopt Smart Bidding 2.0 where you use different conversion values throughout trigger points of the customer Journey, to steer automation and drive your Performance Max Campaign.

Check the Insights Page

The Insights Page helps you understand what is happening in your account and makes it easier to monitor performance, identify areas for improvement.

In Insights you will find broader data from Google like trends across all of their platforms so that we can see how our campaigns are performing over time as well as identify which marketing strategy might work best with us or where there may be room for growth within a campaign’s results.

 

Insights for Performance Max are there to:

• Help you understand why Google automation is making the decisions it is.
• Find new insights into what consumers want that will help you tailor your business strategy so it remains competitive, such as rising search trends and converting audiences.
• Focuses on the levers you can control and will integrate with Recommendations to continually drive better results for your Performance Max campaign.

Should you use Performance Max Campaigns?

In our opinion Yes… We have seen some amazing results across a number of different industries, ranging from Jewellery Ecommerce to Online Hardware Stores all the way to SAAS companies generating leads. So despite a range of clients and goals, we are generally seeing solid performance for our clients when implementing performance max as part of a marketing strategy.

One flaw we have seen and we believe this will be fixed soon, is the cannibalisation of Smart Shopping campaigns. If you see this happen or fear it happening then Performance Max may not be the right approach for your business marketing. After speaking with Google they did suggest if you really wanted to implement performance max along with Smart Shopping then the best practice would be to dedicate 2 separate feeds with a different inventory. So for example, 50% of your Inventory is allocated to a feed for Performance Max and the other 50% of your products are in a stand-alone feed dedicated to Smart Shopping Campaigns.

So let’s conclude

If you’re looking for an automated way to get the most out of your Google Ads account, then Performance Max is worth a closer look. We have seen some fantastic results for our clients and as it stands we are a big fan of Googles Latest feature release.

It uses artificial intelligence technology combined with machine learning to offer optimized bids and make sure that ads are shown in a timely manner on search engine results pages (SERPs) and most of Google ads inventory. This program also lets advertisers choose their commercial objective and decide on a conversion strategy all from one place.

If this sounds too much like hard work for you, don’t forget we’re here to help! Simply contact us today if you want more information about how Performance Max could benefit your business or would like some guidance when it comes time to create your own campaign types.