A Guide to Google Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max was billed as “a innovative way to purchase Google ads” when it first made public in late 2020. The excitement was growing until after one year of testing in beta, Performance Max finally launched for everyone in the month of November 2021.

Now we’ve had the chance to experience the way Performance Max works. Does it perform as promised and deliver more automation, more insights and improved campaign effectiveness for Google Ads as promised?

While some are praising the capability to use Performance Max campaigns to drive amazing results with machines learning. Others point out its weaknesses including the lack of control associated with automated bidding, and the lack of visibility into campaigns and ad performance.

This Performance Max guide will address your most pressing questions about Performance Max. At the end of it you and your agency will be experienced professionals that will impress clients with your expertise about one of the biggest modifications in Google Ads in years. There’s the good and bad as well as the ugly.

What is Performance Max on Google Ads?

Google Performance Max is a new type of goal-based campaign which, as the name suggests is focused on increasing the performance. Particularly, it’s focused on improving the effectiveness of Google Ads campaigns to increase conversions.

Imagine Performance Max as your all-access advertising access to the entire Google Network, which includes the most powerful features such as Search, YouTube, Gmail and Shopping (and this isn’t even talking about Discovery and Display as they are included too! ).

Performance Max is not just a way to Performance Max promise a new automated method of buying ads across all Google’s channels with one campaign It also offers greater insights for people who love data with the use of machine learning and improved report capabilities.

Although it sounds fantastic, Performance Max isn’t perfect. The timeframe before people begin to notice stable performance appears to be between 6 and 8 weeks, which means you have to experiment for a few weeks. A lot of marketers complain about the fact that Performance Max cannibalizes Search campaigns however Google declares it is the case that Search programs should be given priority prior to Performance Max. But don’t fret, we’ll guide you through the problems with Performance Max later in this article.

When to Make Use of Google Performance Max Campaigns

Google suggests using Performance Max when:

There are specific goals in terms of conversion and advertising We suggest setting SMART goals in order to maximize the value of it.

Your ads don’t have to be restricted to a particular channel. If your advertisements have limitations or constraints (i.e. cost, duration, deficiency of resources, etc. ) or were designed specifically for a particular channel, it’s not the right time to utilize Performance Max. It’s ideal for campaigns that have the ability to adjust to changing conditions in real-time.

You’re looking to get access to all Google’s advertising channels with one campaign. Like we said, everything is covered here.

You’re looking to expand those keyword-driven Search campaigns even further. Performance Max can assist you in reaching even more people and increase conversion rates.

What is the Performance Max Performance?

One of the major distinctions that distinguish Google Performance Max campaigns from other Google Ads campaigns is automation and machine learning. In Performance Max, you provide the details (such as goals for the campaign budget, target, and other metrics) as well as Google manages the delivery and targeting of ads by using Smart Bidding.

Smart Bidding is an automated bid strategy that maximizes efficiency across every channel, which allows the management of bids in real-time budgets, audiences, creatives and attributions.

In addition, Performance Max also claims to find out what works best through machine learning, which means it will improve the more you make use of it. However, as we’ve mentioned earlier many people don’t have the time to give Performance Max the 6 – 8 weeks of time that the Google brain appears to require to discover which methods work and what don’t.

Despite its claims of machines learning driven automation you cannot simply build a campaign for a client and let it be left to it’s own devices. There are still many steps to take to ensure Performance Max is running as intended. Performance Max does what it’s supposed to accomplish.
What is Performance Max? for Agents?

Performance Max automates a lot of the manual, time-consuming task of setting up campaigns across multiple platforms. The only thing that companies need to accomplish when using Performance Max is to provide the required information, then monitor and tweak the campaign when Smart Bidding does its thing to assist you in achieving your goals for your campaign.

As with CPA targeted campaigns, Performance Max campaigns are designed to automatically alter the different settings of the campaign to ensure the highest performance. However, as with CPA targeting it isn’t a guarantee of a certain outcome.

While one marketer we heard from said they were getting remarkable results with Performance max but performance has been somewhat of mixed bag for a lot of agencies.

It is important to know the fact that Google is able to adjust Performance Max campaigns to what it sees. If your goal for your campaign is to generate leads then the system will be optimized to bring in the highest amount of leads within your budget, which can be at the cost of quality leads.

The feedback from marketers all over the world indicates that leads coming from PMax are numerous and competitively priced, but they can be less than high-quality. This is an area where Google needs to improve as leads of poor quality cause a strain on the budget of your client and the resources of your sales team.

For all that, low-cost leads do not mean much if they’re converting at a much lower rate often up to 2/3rds less than leads that come from other Google Ads.

While Performance Max is making a further step towards improved tracking, it hasn’t yet achieved “self-drive” status.

However, it’s a platform that nearly all PPC agency should include within its arsenal of campaigns in some way It’s a great idea to be ahead of the game and experiment with some PMax campaigns.

This is what leads us to the following issue…

What inputs does Performance Max Make Use of?

The data sources for Performance Max campaigns include:

Goals of the campaign The most vital input for Performance Max as these campaign kinds are goal-driven.

Audience signals: Determine which of your audiences are and who have the greatest chance of conversion, to guide the machines and automation algorithms to the proper direction. The signals of the audience are crucial and we’ll come back to this topic later.

High-quality creativity: This can include pictures, copy and videos. Make sure to include your best work because you only have so much that automation can do if the content isn’t top-quality.

Conversions: You can determine the most beneficial kinds of conversions that can benefit your company

The Safety Setting: It was designed with account and brand managers in mind. You can define the kinds of content that you do not want ads to run.

Performance Max’s Key Features Campaigns

The most recent announcements about Performance Max included a few new features to give agencies more options regarding goals for conversion and different types of data to help you make better decisions based on information.

Locating New Customers

A brand-new kind of setting for conversions can be found in Performance Max- Customer Acquisition. This feature was popular for Smart Shopping campaigns, and the addition of it to Performance Max only deepens its capabilities.

This will allow you to concentrate on new customers, either by bidding higher to them or by adjusting your marketing campaigns to focus on them. It is also easier to recognize them using Customer Match lists Tags for conversion, as well as autodetection.

While this option could reduce the number of visitors and raise the price per lead also blocks your existing customers from viewing ads (or decreases the amount of ads, in case you choose your lower-bid option). It takes only a few minutes to setup, all you have to do is select an option and verify your list of audience customers.

Audience Signals (Which are incredibly important!)

Audience signals are a brand new feature that is exclusive in Performance Max campaigns that lets you recommend audiences to Google’s machine-learning algorithms to improve conversions.

While it’s not required but we cannot emphasize how important Audience Signals are. We strongly suggest using these within the course of your Performance Max campaigns because it can help Machine Learning algorithms towards proper direction that is towards those who tend to be most likely.

According to Lindsay the expert PPC Expert as well as Performance Max tester, “using solid audience lists is essential. If your audience lists are not strong or are too broad, Performance Max will show your ads to an enormous and insignificant group of people.”

More Insights with Better Results Using Substance

Two additional Insights to be added in Performance Max:

Asset audience information: Discover what kind of customers react to the content videos, images, and text that you use in Google Ads. For instance, if you’re conducting an Performance Max campaign to sell computers to people who are power users, you may notice that they react better to ads with specific product specifications instead of flashy images of the product.

Diagnostic insight Consider the diagnostics as troubleshooters which will identify the setup issues that stop the display of your ads (such as the fact that your ads are rejected) as well as providing suggestions for fixing the issues.

If you’re reading this, you may realize the benefits of the use of Performance Max (such as it is completely automated and also serves as a full-access pass to the whole Google Network), but If you and your company are experts in Smart Shopping and Local campaigns then you may be thinking:

What is the reason Google Performance Max Campaigns So Important?

The quick answer is that Performance Max is replacing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns and is taking place much earlier than you thought.

You may have noticed that it’s already started, which makes it more crucial than ever to agencies learn the concept of what Performance Max is and what it can accomplish.

Since if you don’t upgrade the performance of your Smart Shopping campaigns by the time the end in Q3 2022 (i.e. September) the campaigns will be automatically upgraded with Performance Max (more on that in the future).

The benefits of the Google Performance Max campaign

Performance Max’s main advantages Performance Max are:

Access to the whole Google Network: This will boost your search marketing campaigns based on keywords to the next level , as machine learning delivers the correct advertisements to the right audience at the right moment.

Automation: With Smart Bidding, all aspects of the bidding and buying process is automated in addition, Performance Max will even generate the ads for you using the creative assets you have provided.

Signals from the audience can help you direct your machine-learning algorithms in the right direction , so that you can optimize efficiency and time savings.

Improved insights: New features such as Asset Audience Insights and Diagnostic Insights (which we have discussed in the earlier section).

Campaigns that are focused on goals: To help you meet your marketing goals.

In essence, Google Performance Max campaigns are designed to make your client’s Google Ads campaigns easier to create and to get their advertisements in front of more people, all while optimizing the performance in real time.

To give a day-to-day perspective Here are the items that a marketing agency must execute to complete an entire Performance Max campaign:

Dynamic search campaign

Campaign to display

Discovery campaign

Video-based campaign (optional)

Smart Shopping campaign

Be aware that these campaigns may not include the automated capabilities that are available in Performance Max either, so it could be more labor-intensive to manage all of those campaigns simultaneously.