Google Ads Performance Max: Best Practice

What is Performance Max?

Performance Max is a brand new campaign type that launched in November from Google Ads. It’s an all-in-one campaign type, showing ads on Search including Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discovery, with the goal of driving conversions.

Performance Max (PMax) campaigns are also replacing the Smart Shopping and Local campaigns types. The creation of Smart Shopping campaigns will be sunsetted in July, and all existing Smart Shopping campaigns will automatically be updated to PMax between July and September. Local campaign creation will be sunsetted in June and automatically updated between August and September.

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Performance Max Campaign Setup

As you'd imagine, Google have made the setup of these campaigns. PMax reminds me a little of Google express, if anyone remembers that delight.

• Goals (campaign setting): your options are account-level or campaign-specific. I’ve almost always gone for campaign-specific and focused on the goals that matter, like purchases.
• Customer acquisition (campaign setting): this one is great if you want to push for just new customers. I tested this in beta, and it worked well. I have a client who is solely focused on new customers. When they evaluate performance, they look at the overall increase in new business customers. As an ecom client, they focus on CPA because they know the lifetime value of their clients. We’ve turned on “Only bid for new customers” for this client and added their updated customer lists via Customer Match, and they’ve seen an overall lift in their new client acquisition numbers against their monthly average acquisitions prior to PMax.
• Smart Bidding (campaign setting): you’ve got two options – Conversions and Conversion Value. If you pick Conversions, you can also select a target Cost Per Conversion (tCPA) – selecting it will give a recommended tCPA. Conversion Value will allow you to set a target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) and will give you a recommended tROAS. We’ve had good luck (and it might even be better luck) by not setting a target CPA or ROAS and letting the system figure it out and then adjusting after it comes out of learning.
• Final URL Expansion (campaign setting): PMax uses your URLs like Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns do. This is not something you can opt out of. However, there is part of the campaign setup for Final URL expansion where you can opt out of using specific URLs (like blog pages) or choose to only use the URLs that you submit. I haven’t seen any performance differences where I use all URLs or just those that I submit, so feel free to test.
• Product Feed (campaign setting): this is not required to be added, even if you have an ecommerce client that has a product feed. I’ve had great ROAS success when I haven’t added a feed. One thing important to note is that you can’t REMOVE a feed once you’ve created and published the campaign. So if for some reason, you add a feed and then want to stop including it, you will have to create a new campaign.
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‍Asset Group Settings – Let’s Talk Assets

Images: Lifestyle images tend to work better than product-only shots.

If you don’t have those or are a service company, you’ll want to use stock images if you can. But PMax doesn’t have access to stock images like Display campaigns do. If you’ve already used stock images, you’ll find them in your Google Asset Library.

But what if you haven’t? Here’s the trick I use to get new stock images in the Asset Library. I go into a standard Display campaign and create a new ad group, which I immediately pause (or use an already paused ad group). Then I create a new ad, finding multiple stock images, which I add to the ad. Once I’ve saved that ad (which I immediately pause if I’m not using a paused ad group), those images are available to me in the PMax campaign in the Asset Library tab.

When PMax came out, you could add up to 15 images, but now you can add 20. Keep in mind that for this type, you have three aspect ratios; your normal 1200×628 and 1200×1200 sizes like Display, but also the 960×1200 that’s used in Discovery campaigns. Since, theoretically, it’s one image with three crops, you’d think you could add 21 images, but since it doesn’t work out that way, I’d do less of the 960×1200 than the other two sizes.

Videos: You can add up to five videos. They must be at least 10 seconds long.

Google will automatically create three videos, usually between 15 and 19 seconds long if you don’t add videos. They are meh; also, any Google-created videos are hosted on a generic YouTube Channel, so they won’t be branded with the right logo or Channel name, just a C in a box and the word Channel. So if you can, add at least one of your own videos. At Google Marketing Live, they announced that Video Builder is coming to Asset Library. Videos created with Video Builder are a step up from what Google creates, and they work surprisingly well.

If you don’t add videos but you change your headlines or descriptions, Google will update the videos.

If you don’t add videos but want to add one later, the Google-created ones will go away.

Headlines and Descriptions: This is where it can be hard. Because the text can be used in so many ways,  you have to really think out your ad copy.

• Short Headlines: avoid redundancy – you can only submit five, and any three of them can be used at one time for Search ads.
• Long Headlines: you get five of these. They can be shown instead of a shorter headline and with or without one of the descriptions. They may be truncated.
• Short Description: you enter one of these, and it’s only 60 characters. It almost always shows as LOW for its Performance, though I’ve seen the unicorn of a Good once or twice. I’m also not 100% sure where it’s used. (Short Description isn’t even mentioned as a separate thing in the support docs; Description actually says to add one that’s 30 characters or less. A typo, maybe?)
• Descriptions: add up to four, and same here with avoiding redundancy – any three can be used for Search campaigns. If you do not submit descriptions, Google will automatically create them from your website.
• Display path: the display path is hidden under More Options, so make sure to check that so you can add more to your display URL.

Audience Signals: Note: somewhere in this step seems to be what causes the campaigns to glitch, so skip this and come back to it after you publish. Audience signals are important to give Google a starting point on who they should be going for. Any already created Audience Signals will be available to you, or you can create a new one.

Custom Segments: I tend to add between 15 to 30 of the top converting keywords/phrases for the Asset Group I’m creating. I usually go with “People who searched for any of these terms on Google” but have also done “People who browse types of websites,” usually for competitors’ websites.

Your data: I’ll add Audiences for people who have visited the category or subcategory pages on the website and convertors.

Interests & detailed demographics: Add any appropriate In-market audiences. Life events, as well as detailed demographics like home ownership and parental status, go here.

Demographics: I don’t usually mess with this too much unless a client has a very strong gender or age bias.

Extensions: Don’t forget these; since your campaign will show on Search (which uses many extensions) and Video (which can use Sitelink extensions), you will want to add as many that make sense for your account.

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Lastly: Negative Keywords

One of the things I'll do straight away is create a negative keyword list with brand terms in it and then requesting our Google rep add it to the account so I can try to prevent conversions just moving from our brand campaigns to the PMax campaign. The goal is to increase incremental conversions, not just move conversions from one campaign to another.

And I think this is another oversight on Google’s part. There are many, many reasons why it’s necessary to add negative keywords to a campaign, including brand safety. And while some Google reps are willing to add lists, I've heard of other Google reps refusing or saying it’s not possible. And I know not everyone has a Google rep to reach out to, so that’s eliminating a lot of accounts from opting in.

So now you’ve created your Performance Max campaign. As best you can, don’t touch it, don’t optimize it, don’t muck with it. Let. It. Sit. Give it a week or two to collect data.

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