What you need to know about Performance Max Campaigns

What are Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max campaigns, launched by Google in November 2021, are the newest type of machine learning-based automated campaign that allows ads to be shown across Google’s entire inventory in a single campaign. Thus, this type of campaign helps us discover new users who are likely to convert across all Google channels, such as YouTube, Display, Shopping, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.

This type of campaign is created based on the Google Merchant Center product feed and other information we provide, such as conversion goals, budget, visuals, texts and audience signals. So, the main difference between Performance Max and other campaigns is that Google automates audience targeting and campaign display based on information and signals provided by the advertiser to maximize conversions.

Why Performance Max?

You are surely wondering why you should include Performance Max campaigns in your media strategy, especially as you have less control over these campaigns and everything is in the hands of Google’s algorithms. So, below we`ll give you 4 reasons why we recommend this

• Conversion funnel efficiency

As a user’s customer journey becomes increasingly complicated and difficult to predict, a user needs multiple touchpoints to travel through the conversion funnel from their first interaction to the final conversion step.

By including all Google properties in a single campaign, Performance Max campaigns enable the tracking of the user journey in this complex context and the automatic optimization of results, audiences and cost efficiency according to the conversion funnel.

Now more than ever, the customer journey through all Google properties is more difficult to implement with Search, Youtube and Display campaigns. This doesn’t mean abandoning these campaigns, just that they can’t understand the full user journey to conversion.

• New Audience Segments

A second important reason why you should consider including Performance Max campaigns in your strategy is that they use Artificial Intelligence to understand user intent and preferences in real time based on the audience signals added during the setup.
Thus, the ad will reach the right people, exactly when they are looking for products or services like your business.

By unlocking new audience segments, Performance Max campaigns ensure the discovery of new users based on their purchase intent and set audience signals.

• Meaningful Insights

Unlike Shopping campaigns, Performance Max campaigns offer more insights into Search Trends, audience performance, consumer interests and creative performance.

• New Customers Acquisition Goal

This option allows you to optimize Performance Max campaigns for generating new customers, either by assigning a higher value to them, or by excluding those who have previously converted.

While this setting may reduce the amount of traffic generated and increase the cost of conversion, it prevents ads from being shown to existing customers or if you selected the option to assign an additional value to new customers, the algorithm reduces ads being shown to existing customers.

All you have to do to activate this option is to access the Settings section of the Performance Max campaign, under Customer Acquisition, check the box with “Optimize campaign for acquiring new customers” and select the right option for your business and conversion goals established.

What to look out for when running Performance Max campaigns

Performance Max campaigns have enormous potential and many advantages, but if they are not used configured and optimized in accordance with business objectives, there is a danger of wasting the invested money without generating optimal results for your business.

Therefore, we advise you that before implementing Performance Max campaigns, you should determine what the main objective of the respective campaign is, aligning it with the business objective.

Implementing a Performance Max campaign does not mean excluding the other types of campaigns from the PPC strategy. You should though be aware of how PMax is interacting with the other campaigns in the account. Some explanations you can find directly on Google Support page here.

Another important aspect to consider is the automatic migration of Shopping Smart campaigns to Performance Max campaigns. This happened for all Google Ads accounts by the end of September 2022.

We advise you to check the migrated Smart Shopping campaigns as soon as possible and make sure you introduce a maximum number of creatives and follow the best practices for the setup.

To properly evaluate Performance Max campaigns and draw conclusions about their performance, you need to give them more time than other campaigns because these campaigns work on the basis of Smart Bidding and Machine Learning, taking time to accumulate enough data. The period after which it is recommended to correctly evaluate the results is approximately 4 weeks.

If your eCommerce Google Ads strategy involves the segmentation of Performance Max campaigns according to the type of products, we recommend that you pay attention to the segmentation of products within the campaigns so that there is no overlap of products. In this case, you will be competing against yourself, and costs will increase unnecessarily.

You can think about segmenting the campaign based on product categories, according to Profit margin (Low Margin, High Margin), Bestsellers or Ghost Products.

Conclusions

Performance Max campaigns are a great new feature that Google Ads has brought with it to help businesses become more profitable by serving ads to the ideal target audience.

The current trend is to continue to create, develop and strengthen strategies based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques, aimed at finding the ideal target and satisfying their search intentions.

We will continue to see campaigns and strategies of this type that are able to self-identify the best market alternatives thanks to all the information that can be collected on the site, on the different sites that users visit every time they use the Internet.

That`s why is important to learn to use artificial intelligence and Machine Learning to our advantage, paying attention to all of the aspects over which we have decision-making power: budget, bidding strategy, Audience Signals, targeted products, extensions. Like this we will maximize the results without losing control of the campaigns.