A Complete Guide to Google Performance Max Campaign
Performance Max campaigns are the newest way to advertise across Google’s inventory. We’ve provided an overview of Performance Max campaigns to help you understand what they are and how to use them.
What is the Google Performance Max campaign?
Google Performance Max campaign is a goal-based campaign that runs across the Google platform. With Performance Max, an advertiser can run a single campaign across multiple platforms to maximise exposure and grow conversions.
Google Performance Max will be an upgrade to Google Smart Shopping. While some brands have already begun to use Google Performance Max campaigns, the official rollout will start in July, with Smart Shopping campaigns shutting down in September 2022.
What platforms can I run a Performance Max Campaign On?
Google Performance Max campaigns run across all of Google’s inventory.
Performance Max campaigns allow a single campaign to run across multiple channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. So you can target and find new audiences no matter what part of Google they’re using.
How well do Performance Max campaigns perform?
Early testing of the Performance Max campaign performance is positive, with testing from Q3 last year showing a 13% increase in incremental conversions compared to a similar cost per action.
Additionally, a Google case study from April 2021 showed a 21% increase in conversions when Performance Max was used. This increase in conversion yielded an $800K increase in revenue and a 20% reduction in overall CPA for brands included in the case study.
When should I use a Performance Max campaign?
Google recommends using Performance Max campaigns when:
- You have specific advertising and conversion goals
- You want to access all of Google’s advertising channels with a single campaign
- You want to extend the reach of keyword-based search campaigns
- Your ads aren’t limited to a single channel
How do I set up a Performance Max campaign?
A Performance Max campaign starts with providing Google with your campaign objective and marketing goals. This step allows advertisers to choose campaign-specific goals and remove unnecessary ones.
The next step is budgeting and conversion goals. While you can not specify which channels the budget spend will go to, a target cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) can be set up. It is also possible to select the conversion type to optimise, for example, leads or sales.
After this step, Advertisers set the language and geo-location. It is imperative to select the correct language because Performance Max appears in Search.
The option to set a URL expansion is automatically on. This setting allows Google to send traffic to the most relevant URL and avoid sending customers to pages such as the About Us page on a site. Turn off the Final URL expansion when wanting to provide a URL manually.
The final step involves setting up asset groups and providing assets. Asset groups are essentially ad groups that have different target ads. It is a great way to target different audiences or provide a range of offers. It is important to provide Google with high-quality assets. Assets include headlines, descriptions, logos, images, and video.
Google will take all the information and run it across their inventory through an automated AI system. The automation system will identify what combination of assets performs the best for each segment and on what platform to create the best performing ad possible.
What are Performance Max listing groups?
When creating a Performance Max campaign, Google allows you to create Listing Groups – known as Product Groups in the UI. Naming conventions aside, listing groups are a fairly straightforward concept. Listing groups are the process of creating target groups that will have specific products marketed towards them.
If you have a large number of product listings, listing groups are a great way to divide your products into groups with their own creative assets and market to customer groups who will find these ads relevant.
What are Performance Max asset groups?
An asset group is a selection of assets that have been grouped based on a theme or target audience. Adding a creative asset to a group means that that creative asset can appear with any other creative assets that are in that group in any combination.
It’s possible to create multiple asset groups for one Performance Max campaign. This allows you to group creative assets into specific themes and monitor how different groups perform.
How are listing groups and asset groups different?
Simply put, Performance Max listing groups are groups centred around specific products, and asset groups are groups of creative assets.
A listing group is a way to divide your audience into groups that will have specific products targeted towards them. Listing groups have their own creative assets based on the products.
An asset group is a selection of creative assets. Specific themes or audiences are used to define asset groups. Asset groups are a way to separate creative assets to ensure the asset combinations Google creates are relevant.
What is included in Performance Max reporting?
Reporting and campaign insights have proven to be a shortfall of Google Performance Max Campaigns, with reporting being a key complaint with early adopters of Performance Max. However, earlier this year, Google announced their continued rollout of new reporting features.
Performance Max reports currently include:
- A high-level overview of how well the campaign is performing on a whole
- Insights into location-specific performance
- Reports broken down into day of the week, hour of the day, and day and week combined
The updates, announced by Google, will include:
- Customer interest insights, which allow advertisers to see search themes that are driving conversions
- Audience asset insights, which will provide information on how each asset performs with the intended audience
- Diagnostic insights, which will flag any potential setup issues that are blocking ads from appearing
- Optimisation and recommendations to help advertisers see how they can improve their campaign
What isn’t included in Performance Max reporting?
As stated previously, Performance Max campaign reporting does have its limitations. Here’s a run-down of what Performance Max reporting is missing.
- Performance Max reports provide limited insight into budget allocation. Reports do not show what channels the budget is spent on and on the type of visitor (whether they are new or retargeted).
- Because the campaigns are AI-generated, you can not see the performance of individual assets, making it difficult to see how to change or optimise your campaign.
- Google restricts access to performance data. Currently, it isn’t possible to see how campaigns perform on individual channels, making it impossible to know where campaign performance is strongest.
- While advertisers can inform Google of their target audience, they can not see who is seeing the campaign.
Performance Max Campaign checklist
When creating Performance Max Campaigns remember to:
- Select campaign goals carefully and avoid selecting irrelevant or duplicate goals. Setting accurate campaign goals helps Google to optimise your campaign toward your goals.
- Add first-party data, such as customer lists, to help Google learn faster and find high-value customers to target your campaign towards
- Set your budget carefully and try to allocate a budget that is 3 times higher than your target CPA
- Use high-quality creative assets. You can upload Display images, logos, ad copy, and YouTube videos. You can’t decide which combination of creative assets will appear, so it is best to choose creative assets that could work together regardless of the combination. The more creative assets you provide, the more channels Google can run your campaign on
- Create your videos. If you do not, Google will pull Display images from your site.
SOMO's Takeaways
Nick, UK Performance Lead
For me, Performance Max is another step towards AI in advertising, which helps to make the most use of media budgets.
It will allow agencies and brands to focus and invest more time into previously ignored aspects of performance marketing, such as creative assets and landing page experience.
Performance Max also allows Google to use data signals to make bid adjustments at scale while accounting for multiple factors, such as the time of day, location, and actual search query.
Pedro, Head of Google & Analytics
Performance Max is a major milestone in Google’s marketing automation strategy. The compulsory migration to Performance Max is happening less than a year after its release, which shows how confident Google is about it. The lack of manual controls might be intimidating, but Google’s machine learning is improving year over year.
Personally, I think this is a great way to take advantage of Google’s extensive network, including Shopping, Gmail and YouTube, with a single campaign. As a marketer, this shifts the focus from targeting and budget allocation to making better creatives and improving the website experience.
For now, there is room for improvement in terms of reporting. Results can be hit-or-miss, and reporting is a bit disappointing. Google should give more insights on which channels your budget is being spent and more performance metrics for each asset.
Also, be aware that Performance Max requires significant data to learn. The more data you provide Google, the better. This is why – now more than ever – it is crucial to have conversion tracking set up correctly while also complying with the most recent privacy rules.
Interested in setting up a Performance Max campaign? SOMO is here to help you grow your business revenue through Google. So, why not set up a free strategy call with us today?
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