How to Start with Performance Max Campaigns?

What Is Google’s Performance Max?

Performance Max is an ad campaign type that allows you to create a single campaign to promote your products across all of Google’s advertising channels. That means your ads are displayed across Google pages like search results, Maps, and Shopping.

But that’s not all! Your ads are also shown on Google sites like YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, plus thousands of partnering websites.

The primary difference between Performance Max and other ad campaigns is that Google automates the campaign targeting and delivery based on the information you provide. You can include:

• your product feed (a file with your product data),
• audience signals (potential customers’ interests, what they’re researching, or how they’ve interacted with your business),
• high-quality text, images, and video.

Differences Between Normal Google Ads Campaigns and Performance Max Campaigns

• Standard Google Ads campaigns allow you to create ad groups that target different audiences. However, in Performance Max, all ads are automatically shown to the users most likely to convert for a particular target. You can also provide cues or information to Google to better optimize your digital campaigns for the audiences you are most interested in.
• Performance Max campaigns can be shown across all Google inventory, including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover. This feature maximizes your chances of reaching your target audience.
• When it comes to optimizing bids, Performance Max campaigns enable the algorithm to gain full visibility into auction data across all Google properties.
• Performance Max takes full advantage of Google’s automation capabilities, including targeting and campaign delivery.

How to Create a Performance Max Campaign Step by Step

Select Your Objectives

The first thing to do is to select the main objective of your campaign from these options:

• Sales: drive online, phone, or in-store sales.
• Leads: get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action.
• Website traffic: get qualified traffic to visit your website.
• Product and brand consideration: encourage people to explore your products or services.
• Brand awareness and reach: increase awareness of your brand among more users.
• Promote an app: get more installs, interactions, and pre-registrations on an app.
• Store visits and promotions: get users to visit your store in person.

Choose Performance Max Campaigns

Once you have defined your goals, choose Performance Max as your campaign type to access all Google Ads channels and inventory.

Determine a Bid Strategy and Budget

The bid strategy and budget for a Performance Max campaign should be in line with your overall business objectives. Here are the main options:

• Conversion value: this strategy is most appropriate if you want to maximize conversions that have different values for your company.
• Conversions: this strategy is most appropriate if you want to maximize conversions and they all have approximately the same value for your company.

Choose Additional Campaign Settings

You will then need to select these settings:

• The location and language of your marketing campaign.
• The schedule and dates.
• The tracking template.
• The end URL suffix. Google Ads recommends enabling end URL expansion to expand coverage on relevant search queries. This feature allows you to appear in other searches with the possibility of generating conversions.
• The negative keywords at the account level.

Create a Group of Assets

As with other Google Ads campaigns, the quality and variety of your creatives is important when it comes to the success of your campaign. In Performance Max, you can create asset groups to manage different creatives, similar to ad groups in other types of campaigns.

Assets include the final URL or landing page, images, logos, videos, titles and descriptions, and a call to action. To optimize your campaigns, you can create different asset groups associated with a single theme. You can upload images from your computer, choose assets you have already used in previous marketing campaigns or extract them from your website or YouTube channel. If you don’t have videos, Performance Max will automatically create a high-quality video using your assets.

Select Your Audience

With the audience signals feature, you can tell Google which segments are likely to complete conversions or which ads best reach a particular digital audience.

Add Extensions

Include ad extensions such as site links, featured text, callouts, or lead forms. This makes your ads stand out more and provides additional information to your potential customers.