First things first … what exactly is Performance Max?
Performance Max is an innovative goal-based campaign type, designed by Google to empower performance advertisers, to enhance campaign performance and increase online sales & revenue, by leveraging all of Google’s inventory, from a single campaign.
With Performance Max, you utilize advanced machine learning and automation to optimize bidding and placements, and maximise conversions for your goals.
To help Google’s delivery algorithm optimize for high-value conversions, you need to provide key data inputs, like the conversion actions you want to optimise for, audience signals (we suggest using your own customer data) and high quality creative assets, including text, images, and video assets.
How Does Performance Max Work?
Performance max is available when you choose the following campaign goals: 1. sales, 2. leads, and 3. local store visits & promotion. And your performance will be influenced by the settings you choose. For that reason we suggest wisely choosing your objective, conversion goal, bidding strategy & attribution model.
Performance Max uses advanced AI to identify the right cost-per-click (CPC) bid for each auction in real time, and maximise your chances of achieving your desired outcome at the minimum cost.
When setting up your campaign you have two bidding strategies available:
The maximize conversions bidding will focus on increasing the number of conversions. Google’s algorithm will optimise towards getting as many conversions as possible, regardless the value or the cost per conversion. While, you have the option to set a Target CPA and focus smart bidding on getting as many conversions as possible within your target CPA.
The maximize conversion value bidding will try to maximise conversion value, for your given budget, by increasing bidding on auctions that could result in greater conversion value. Smart bidding automatically sets your bid and focuses on getting the most valuable conversions. By adding a target ROAS to your bid strategy, you can guide smart bidding on attempting to reach your target ROAS goal.
Expert Tips:
If you want to maximise performance, we suggest collecting as much data as possible, before running your first Performance max campaign, to help Google determine what works best for your account and identify your ideal customer.
If you are a new advertiser, maximize your Search campaigns before transitioning to PMax. To build a steady stream of conversions, collect conversion data (on account level) and focus on low-funnel users with high your search campaigns.
When to Use Performance Max?
Performance Max campaign is the ideal choice for you if you:
have specific conversion goals (e.g. online sales or lead generation)
want to maximise performance beyond keyword-based Search campaigns
want to connect with potential customers at different stages of their journey
wish to leverage Google's advanced machine learning capabilities
intent to simplify campaign management and consolidate your efforts into a single campaign that runs across all Google's inventory
Benefits of PMax you can’t overlook
1. Finding High Converting Customers through Audience Signals: Performance Max uses Google's advanced AI capabilities, to optimize bidding and improve your conversion rate, through audience signals, that help smart bidding target users with higher conversion probability. Use your own data to help smart bidding focus your budget on high intent users and generate conversions across Google’s inventory.
2. Keyword Opportunities – Insights: Performance Max targets search queries based on custom intent audiences, product data feeds, and website URLs. Despite the absence of negative keywords, Performance Max captures unforeseen opportunities and provides insights into rising search trends.
3. Simplify Campaign Management: Combining all elements into a single campaign, Performance Max streamlines campaign management, saving time and effort by consolidating your focus into a single campaign that runs across various Google networks.
4. Works Well with Existing Search Campaigns: Complementary to other campaigns, performance max extends reach and brings in additional conversions beyond conventional search, display or shopping
5. One Campaign, Huge Reach: Access Google's extensive network and reach potential customers across multiple online touchpoints, increasing the chances of converting them. PMax is a full-funnel campaign type, as your ads run across all Google platforms, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.
6. Dynamic Ad Creatives: Performance Max campaigns leverage dynamic ad creative optimization, enabling Google to automatically generate multiple combinations of headlines and descriptions, based on factors such as user behavior, demographics, or contextual relevance, for optimum
7. Full-Funnel Advertising: With PMax campaigns you can reach potential customers across the funnel, and at different stages of their journey, from awareness to consideration and conversion and generate full-funnel results.
8. Leveraging Google's advanced AI: PMax campaigns use Google's advanced machine learning capabilities, for real-time optimization and ad delivery, based on user behavior and historical performance
PMax Drawbacks you need to know
1. Lack of Control: Performance advertisers can’t fully optimise multiple important campaign variables. For example, you can’t select different bidding strategies on different asset groups, within the same campaign. Many campaign elements, like ad combinations, are left entirely up to Google.
2. Auto-generated ads: Google’s AI system generates multiple ad variations by combining the image, video and text assets you provide. Since these ad combinations are developed automatically, you can’t control your branding.
3. Limited insights: The highly automated nature of Performance Max makes it a "black box" for most advertisers, especially if you have minimal PPC experience. You define campaign inputs and hope that the algorithm will generate However, the data that can be utilized to make conclusions and guide campaign optimization are very limited.
4. Priority in structuring: Identifying key themes is crucial, as asset groups are central to Performance Max, requiring a coherent and relevant creative approach.
5. Investing in high-quality creatives is a must: YouTube and responsive display ads are a non-negotiable aspect of you PMax campaigns’ success. You must use multiple images and videos, even if you have limited resources to create them. Advertisers need to invest even more to compete Failure to provide the required assets can result in poor ads generated automatically by PMax, like their auto-generated videos.
6. High risk of Failure: If you don’t have a well-crafted plan you risk generating low quality conversions that don’t generate conversion value and give the wrong signals to the algorithm. You need to invest lot of thinking before you actually set your campaign up. For your Performance Max campaigns to work efficiently, map out your bid strategy, asset groups, and creative in advance.
7. Limited Data on Keyword level: Keyword and search term-level data are very limited, and they are accessible only in the insights tab. However, the data in this section generate more generalised information for the entire campaign. Lack of keyword-level data creates a challenge in performing actionable optimisations, particularly implementing search query filtering by using negative keywords.
8. Lack Of Negative Keywords: Adding negative keywords at the campaign level in PMax is not possible. While you can add negative keywords at the account level, this option would block those keywords from all campaigns within your account, limiting your ability to control them individually in separate campaigns.
Need Help With Your Performance Max Campaigns?
Google Performance Max campaigns are designed to optimise performance using machine learning models to meet your business goals. This doesn't mean you can set and forget them. You still need to stay on top of Google PMax management.
Specialist Performance Marketing agencies use their knowledge of Google Ads platform to optimise towards the most important conversion actions your business wants to achieve. If you are a retail business in need of help with Google PMax, get in touch with our specialist team to discuss how our expertise can help you achieve your business goals.
Date:
Monday, 08 Jan 2024
Written by:
Performance Team
Category:
Google Ads
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
