The Ultimate Guide to Performance Max and the Google Ads Network

• Google does all the heavy lifting: Performance Max and Smart Bidding make it more accessible for novice advertisers the appropriate visual and text assets, and you’ll have a targeted campaign at your disposal for the most likely-to-convert users.This lower learning curve means that not every company that uses it has to be an expert in online advertising.
• Flexible for different budget sizes: Using Performance Max has great benefits for companies who wouldn’t otherwise have the budget to spend on a far-reaching online campaign.However, this isn’t to say that those with deeper pockets can’t benefit from Performance Max, too, as they can use it to unlock segments of their target audience that they may not otherwise have access to.
• Strategic performance is better observed: Factors like campaign planning and PPC reporting are easier to obtain with Performance Max as everything is in one campaign, unlike other multi-campaign strategies that take more time to interpret.

• Less control: The lack of control and having to trust that an AI will serve their marketing well can be a turn-off for some marketers who are used to being behind the wheel of their campaigns’ more granular details.
• Rookie errors can still be made: The accessibility to novice marketers can be deceitful. Relying too much on external forces and throwing caution to the wind when setting up Performance Max can cost a company much in wasted marketing resources.
• The AI is only as good as you make it: If you don’t know what you want to achieve out of your campaign and you don’t provide the AI with optimised criteria fit for your campaign, it won’t provide relevant results.

Performance Max is one of the latest campaign types launched by Google. It allows advertisers to display ads across Google’s entire advertising inventory from a singular campaign, including:

• Search
• YouTube
• Google Maps
• Discover

Performance Max also uses the help of machine learning and advertiser input to automate the targeting and delivery of a campaign.

Performance Max is ideal for e-commerce; it is the first style of campaign that allows marketers to access both the top and bottom of the sales funnel via one singular campaign.

Now that Google is providing more visibility from an optimisation standpoint, Performance Max is becoming increasingly effective for the majority of e-commerce brands, especially those with strong creative assets.

• Create a new campaign within your account (via the blue ‘+’ button).
• Select your main campaign objective – sales, lead gen, website traffic, promotions, store visits, etc. – to allow Performance Max to optimise for your specific conversion goal.
• Select the campaign type as ‘Performance Max’.
• Select daily budget, bidding strategy, location and language.
• Set up your ‘asset groups’ – these are a collection of creatives centred on a theme or related to a target audience in the form of images, logos, headlines, descriptions, and videos.
• Once set up, you then have the option to add multiple ad extensions (e.g. Sitelinks, structure snippets, etc.).

In a nutshell, no. Performance Max at the moment does have a Search feature whereby you can input keywords to help with your Search network targeting. However, manual Search campaigns allow for much more control when it comes to:

• Keywords
• Ad groups
• Campaign segmentation
• Bid strategy flexibility
• Landing page testing

Performance Max doesn’t yet have enough control or visibility in order to outperform large-scale Search campaigns, especially for lead gen.

With Google’s 500 touch-point paradigms, it typically takes up to two weeks for a Performance Max campaign to complete its ‘learning’ phase.

However, depending on the specific goals and KPIs of the business, a Performance Max campaign can ‘work’ well before or after this learning phase is completed.

Performance Max has replaced Smart Shopping entirely for businesses after a phased rollout beginning in April 2022. Any legacy Smart Shopping campaigns that haven’t been manually upgraded to Performance Max will be done so automatically.

Performance Max campaigns are great for a variety of reasons, predominantly because of their ability to:

• Create demand via Display and YouTube
• Capture demand via Shopping and Search

This is completely unique to Google’s past campaign options.

If you’re an e-commerce business and you want to feature on the Google Shopping network then it’s crucial that you have a feed set up. If advertising on Google Shopping is not relevant to your business, however, then you will not need a feed.

There are some assets that are necessary for Performance Max, including images that highlight your product or service, as well as brand imagery and logos.

Though bespoke videos are not essential as Google generates their own based on display images and ad copy, they are recommended. This is because the automatically generated Google videos are of poor quality and do a poor job of advertising the business/products.

Just upload your various assets to each channel and Google’s machine learning then tests which combinations work best for your campaign.

Performance Max campaigns can be run across the entire Google network, including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Shopping, and Discovery. This wide scope of coverage is one of the key benefits that makes Performance Max stand out from Google’s other campaign types.

Performance Max was announced in May 2021 at a Google Marketing live stream event and then began a phased rollout from April until September 2022.

With Performance Max, increasing the budget every two weeks is recommended when scaling. Depending on your budget, the time period to increase can be sooner or later.

For example, if you are spending £40 to £50 per day, you should aim to wait 2 weeks, making the judgement based on the data collected.

If you are spending £100 per day, you would naturally have more data because Google’s machine learning is quicker when it has more budget to spend, so you can make that change in budget sooner rather than later.

However, you must give your Performance Max campaign enough time to analyse the data.

This can take up to 45 days so you should let your Performance Max campaigns run for a month minimum – without tweaking any of the settings – before making any budget increase considerations so you can fully understand it.

When you start seeing consistent results on goals like ROAS, you can then begin to gradually increase your budget.

Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type. It allows Google Ads users direct advertising access to all channels – including YouTube, Display, Search, Shopping, Discover, Gmail & Maps – from a single campaign.

Goal Focused – Performance Max has targeting settings based on the conversion goals that you select in the campaign setup, so your marketing objectives are always prioritised above anything else. It also uses Smart Bidding to look at historical search behaviour to predict the likelihood of a conversion and can increase your bid when it deems a conversion more likely.

Easier Ad Optimisation & Ad Copy – Ads are built and evaluated by Google across many iterations of ads. Like the name Performance Max suggests, this evaluation is to guarantee your ads are performing to their highest potential. Whichever combination of ads performs the best – according to your campaign goals – determines which ones get shown more frequently.

Full Channel Coverage – Performance Max makes it easier to manage your campaign as it makes use of all of its channels – Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery. By using full channel coverage, ads reach a wider audience and gain more visibility.

Saves Time and Money – You do not need to be a PPC expert to run a Performance Max campaign. In fact, Google’s machine learning does a lot of the hard work for you as long as you provide the relevant campaign inputs. This saved time can then be used to plan, create, and optimise higher-quality creative assets.

You create a new campaign within your account with the campaign type set as ‘Performance Max’ along with setting your conversion goals, bidding strategy and budget.

The best practices for building Performance Max campaigns include:

• Implement accurate, full-funnel conversion tracking
• Use URL extensions
• Add at least one video asset
• Create an audience signal
• Use conversion objectives only

Like any campaign, Performance Max works if it is used correctly and set up with best practices. It’s best when you have specific conversion goals like driving sales or generating leads and when you aren’t limited by which channel your ads appear on.

Performance Max is relatively quick to set up and best used as a supplement to your pre-existing efforts.

However, there is still an ongoing debate as regards its overall value due to the lack of control that comes with giving over your campaign to Google’s AI rather than monitoring it yourself

It is neither worse nor better. Both have different variables and different campaign settings, so this question depends on the goals of your business/campaign.

Performance Max provides greater capacity for wider reach due to the higher number of Google’s networks in runs, whereas Smart Shopping required fewer assets than Performance Max.

Performance Max is replacing Smart Shopping. The difference between the two is that Performance Max is more goal-based and audience oriented, whereas Smart Shopping was reliant on shopping titles/product categories in relation to targeting. Performance Max also allows you to use bid modifiers, ad schedules, as well as video.

Audience signals are a new feature unique to Performance Max campaigns. They let you suggest audiences to Google’s algorithm in order to score better conversions.

By letting Google Ads know what type of users you’re interested in showing your ads to, audience signals can ‘jumpstart’ a Performance Max campaign by optimising based on your goals.

Each Performance Max campaign requires at least one asset group made up of images, logos, headlines, descriptions, and videos.

There is a maximum of 100 asset groups per campaign, which is a huge advantage for eCommerce clients.

Performance Max works well with search campaigns as a complementary campaign helping you to find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels.

This means your search campaign will help fuel your Performance Max campaign enabling it to fast-track its data process, therefore accelerating its learning phase.

Fortunately, with Performance Max, users are given a wealth of options and controls to use, including:

• Asset Groups: ad copy, display imagery, video assets
• Audience Signals: who you want Google to target, what data you want Google to utilise, competitor websites, search terms audiences/demographics
• Product Listing: SKU (stock-keeping unit) targeting
• Bidding strategies: maximise conversion value, maximise conversion value w/ TROAS (target return on ad spend), maximise conversions, maximise conversions with TCPA (target cost per acquisition)
• Budget adjustments
• Conversion actions you’re wanting to achieve
• Seasonal bid adjustments
• Excluding poor-performing products
• Final URL Expansion setting (On or Off)
• Targeting historically non-converting users exclusively or placing preference on targeting historically non-converting users
• Removing all asset groups to run campaigns as smart shopping
• Negative keywords list (via Google Account Managers)
• Search terms reporting / insights
• Ad schedule segmentation
• Location targeting
• Extensions
• Auction insights reporting
• Assets performance/insights

Performance Max reporting is currently quite limited. What you can report on:

• Top-level campaign performance
• Location performance
• See performance reports by day of week and hour of day

However, you can’t report on individual assets, only a general overview.

The biggest difference that separates Performance Max from other campaign types is automation and machine learning. You provide the information (budget, target metrics, etc.) and Google handles the targeting and delivery of ads using smart bidding.

Performance Max was designed to learn what works best through machine learning, meaning your ads should perform better the more you use it.

Performance Max has been created to maximise the performance of your campaign. Performance Max may suit you if you have:

• A small budget and want more ad exposure across different channels.
• Little to no knowledge of Google Ads. This is because Performance Max is mostly automated and therefore requires little input.
• Limited time or resources to optimise each channel.
• Previously found Smart Shopping campaigns beneficial.

Although Google makes it relatively simple for you to set up your Performance Max campaign, there are some things to keep in mind, such as:

• Implement accurate, full-funnel conversion tracking.
• Create a PMax segment in Google Analytics for better reporting.
• Use URL exclusions.
• Add at least one video asset.
• Watch out for default location settings.
• Use Performance Max for conversion objectives only.
• Create an audience signal
• Check the Insights tab for improvements in reporting transparency.
• Don’t duplicate your Merchant Center feed imagery.
• Watch out for customer acquisition rules.

A performance marketing strategy involves advertisers only paying when a specific action occurs. This can be a conversion or lead generated. Advertising objectives such as CPM (cost per mile), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), and CPL (cost per lead) are therefore a measure of performance marketing effectiveness.

Companies using Performance Max marketing pay only when a specific action is achieved. It is therefore a cost-effective and results-driven strategy, especially useful for businesses with a limited budget. Paying only for achieved results helps in ensuring money is well-spent.