How to Manage Performance Max Campaigns Profitably?

Performance Max is an objective-driven campaign type that allows you to access all your Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.

It’s designed to complement your keyword-based search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, etc.

The strategy can help you drive performance, delivering more conversions by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding.

Performance Max combines Google’s automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. They’re all empowered by your specific advertising objective (CPA or ROAS target) and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feed you provide.

So how can you optimize your Performance Max campaigns faster for exponential profits?

There’s an AI-driven application that can help you with this.

How?

The application dives into your data and generates insights that matter to you. These insights come either as risks or opportunities for you to double down on your successes. The Artificial intelligence-driven (which we’ll talk about later) is aligned with Kaizen (continuous improvement).

In other words, the tool can help you drive up to 3,778% in exponential gains in one year if you follow its insights.

In this blog, you’ll learn:

• What is a Performance Max Campaign in Google Ads?
• Performance Max Campaigns Best Practices
• What are the Main Advantages of a Performance Max Campaign?
• How Do You Optimize Performance Max Campaigns?
• Wrap Up

What is a Performance Max Campaign in Google Ads?

Performance Max is a campaign type designed to complement your keyword-based search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s properties.

The strategy combines Google’s automation technologies across:

• Bidding
• Budget optimization
• Audiences
• Creatives
• Attribution

So, you might have a question in mind, how do I create a Performance Max campaign in Google Ads?

For advertisers without a Merchant Center feed or Store visits Goal

If you don’t have a Merchant Center feed or a store visit goal, follow the steps mentioned below:

• Sign in to your Google Ads account.
• In the page menu on the left, select
• Click the Plus button, then select New Campaign.
• Select an advertising objective for your campaign. If none of the goals fit what you’re looking for, select create a Campaign without a goal’s guidance.
• Confirm the conversion goals for your campaign. Your account goals will be default prepopulated, but you can remove these or add new goals.
• Select Performance Max as your campaign type.
• Enter a campaign name.
• Select Continue.
• Set your budget and bidding
• Add your location and languages in Campaign Settings
• Build your asset group
• Add ad extensions
• Publish your campaign

For advertisers with a Merchant Center feed

If you have a Merchant Center feed, follow the steps mentioned below:

• Create a new campaign and choose your goal
• Sign in to your Google Ads account.
• In the page menu on the left, select Campaigns.
• Click the Plus Button to select a new campaign.
• Select an advertising objective for your campaign. If none of the goals fit what you’re looking for, select create a Campaign without a goal’s guidance.
• Confirm the conversion goals for your campaign. Your account goals will be default prepopulated, but you can remove these or add new goals.
• Select Performance Max as your campaign type.
• Select your Merchant Center account and the country where products are sold.
• Enter a campaign name.
• Select Continue.
• Set your budget and bidding
• Add your location and languages in the Campaign Settings
• Build your asset group
• Add ad extensions
• Publish your campaign

For Advertisers with a Store Visits Goal (Beta)

• Sign in to your Google Ads account.
• In the page menu on the left, select Campaigns.
• Click the Plus Button to select a new campaign.
• Select an advertising objective for your campaign. If none of the goals fit what you’re looking for, select create a Campaign without a goal’s guidance.
• Confirm the conversion goals for your campaign. Your account goals will be default prepopulated, but you can remove these or add new goals.
• Select Performance Max as your campaign type.
• Select store locations as your campaign feed. Campaigns with a store visit-only goal will be in Beta until 2022.
• Enter a campaign name.
• Select Continue.
• Set your budget and bidding.
• Add your location and languages in the Campaign Settings.
• Build your asset group.
• Add ad extensions.
• Publish your campaign

Performance Max Campaigns Best Practices

Run campaigns for at least 6 weeks to allow the machine learning algorithm to ramp up and have sufficient data.

• Add at least 5 versions of text assets (4 headlines, 5 descriptions) to your asset group.
• Add at least 5 versions of image assets (including 1200×1200) to your asset group.
• Use as many assets as possible.
• Use relevant audience lists as Signals to speed up machine learning ramp-up.
• Utilize Google Ads Conversion Tracking rather than Google Analytics conversion import to track video views or cross-device conversions.

Best Practices for Online Sales (Non-Shopping)

• Campaign Setup

Performance Max campaigns are powered by machine learning. To drive success, you’ve got to provide it with as much data. Besides, use remarketing lists, custom intent, customer match, and customer match similar audiences as Signals.

• Creative

Refresh your creatives because they’re the most powerful tool to drive performance. Besides, they allow you to customize your campaigns to promote new products or new offers. For the best results, focus on providing unique content.

• Be Ahead of the Pack

Start the campaign 2-3 weeks in advance for weekend sales, then refresh your creative frequently. Besides, move from more generic store creative to sales-focused creative. This strategy will allow you to do time-based promotions without compromising performance.

Customers look to visual sources online for inspiration about what to buy. Use the visual inventory to target new customers.

• Reporting

Ad strength can be found during ad creation and in a new column in Google Ads. The metric ranges from “Poor” to “Excellent.”

Best Practices for Lead Generation

• For Lead Gen, use offline conversion import or enhanced conversions to correctly value conversions.
• Import offline conversions regularly.
• Use value-based bidding strategies to value offline and online conversions correctly.
• If using Maximize-conversions or tCPA bid strategies, select the deepest funnel conversion action with sufficient frequency and set the tCPA accordingly. Mark other lead conversions (goals) as “Observation Only.”
• Use the “Ad Strength” indicator to determine if an asset group is set up for success.
• Add more assets as your marketing message evolves, or new assets to continue to capture additional users. More assets mean more potential ad formats that can be created for different channels and users.
• Ensure your image assets meet our highest quality guidelines (e.g., Discovery, image extensions, video ads) to enable serving on as many surfaces as possible for better performance.
• A lead form best practice would be to ask only for strictly necessary information. Additional questions will decrease the completion rate and hence increase CPA.

Best Practices for Retail Advertisers with a Google Merchant Center Feed

• Testing Performance Max campaigns
• Performance Max campaigns are prioritized over existing Smart Shopping campaigns running the same products in the same account.

Once the Performance Max campaign starts, shopping campaigns budget allocation will significantly decrease (regardless of budget breakdown).

• To minimize performance ramifications, set similar budgets for your Performance Max as that of your existing Smart Shopping campaigns for it to capture previous shopping inventory.
• Once your Performance Max campaign is up and running, pause your Smart Shopping campaign.

Keep reading because, in the coming section, we’ll address the following question: what are the main advantages of a Performance Max campaign?

What are the Main Advantages of a Performance Max Campaign?

• Easier to Optimize

Performance Max campaigns can increase your online leads and conversions by automatically optimizing your budget and bids across Google’s ad platforms.

The aforementioned means you can increase your campaign goals at a far more efficient rate than a generic search campaign. Add your budget, goals, and the conversions you’d like to measure, and Google’s ad automation technologies will do the rest.

• Unlocking New Audience Segments

Performance Max unlocks new audience segments by using the search engine’s real-time understanding of consumers’ intent, preferences, and other behavioral features across all their channels.

You can ensure your ads are seen by the right people, exactly when they’re looking for products or services like yours.

• More Substantial Data Insights

Performance Max campaigns can help you better understand how Google’s algorithm is handling your campaign.

The strategy gives you the ability to see which audience segments and image combinations successfully reach users, allowing you to further dial in current and future campaigns. We’ll address the following question in the coming section: How do you optimize Performance Max campaigns?

How Do You Optimize Performance Max Campaigns?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is less about marketing and more about managing your campaigns and continuously improving.

PPC automation allows you to control your Performance Max campaigns through machine learning, without spending hours tediously updating scope, timing, and targeting. By automating some of the systems and steps, you can leverage third-party applications to do the hard work.

It’s impossible to keep an eye on every change happening in your PPC Ads account and manage all of the above-listed responsibilities.

Automating your campaign management is not a matter of handing over your PPC responsibilities to the AI-driven application. It’s about reallocating your time and energy to strategic business tasks that require complex reasoning, decisions, and adapting.

Through the power of machine learning and automation, you can commit all of your time to tasks that matter, instead of wasting hours on tedious, low-priority tasks.

This is where PPC Signal comes in.

So, what is a PPC Signal?

PPC Signal is designed ground-up purposely to help you optimize your clients as quickly as making a cup of coffee.

Besides, this iconic time-saver is designed to help you drive success in your Performance Max campaigns at an affordable price.

PPC Signal uses artificial intelligence technology to automatically monitor your digital marketing campaign data for significant changes requiring your action.

These notable changes can be categorized as shifts, trends, or outliers.

A shift occurs when consecutive data points fall above or below the norm. On the other hand, outliers are single data points that fall way above or below the standard deviation line Trends are the relatively long-term up and downswing movement of a particular phenomenon.

These noteworthy changes are presented as signals.

Each signal is labeled as either a risk or an opportunity. You have absolute freedom to choose the noteworthy changes to pursue.

How Does PPC Signal Can Help You Manage Successful Performance Max Campaigns?

Below is a dashboard of a PPC Signal analyzing Performance Max campaigns.

On the left side, it has widgets, which provide multiple options, such as dimensional insights. The blue Explore button provides more details about a signal using charts and additional information.

You can easily bookmark a signal for later reference by clicking the Bookmark button.

For instance, the dashboard above reports a decline in clicks while impressions are increasing. The aforementioned is an anomaly because clicks and impressions should have a directly proportional relationship.

The red color denotes a risk, which should be acted upon with urgency.

If you click the blue Explore button, you’ll come across a window with a visualization chart providing extra insights into the opportunity or risk detected by PPC Signal.

Also, you can access key insights via tables as shown below. To interpret the table below, check the color codes for each column. For instance, green denotes growth while red shows decline.

The dashboard above shows conversions are marked in red color, which is a risk signal.

Why?

The conversion rate is abysmal compared to the corresponding impressions and clicks. There’s a need for more investigation to find out where conversion rates are declining. One of the possible areas to check includes:

• Ad assets
• Landing pages

FAQs:

Why should you use a Performance Max campaign?

Performance Max is a campaign type designed to complement your keyword-based search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s properties.

The strategy combines Google’s automation technologies across:

• Bidding
• Budget optimization
• Audiences
• Creatives
• Attribution

The strategy can help you to drive more conversions than search-based campaigns.

When should you use Performance Max campaigns?

Use Performance Max campaigns if you have specific advertising and conversion goals (e.g., driving online sales, lead generation, etc.).

Also use the strategy, if your goal is to maximize the performance of your campaign. The strategy is not limited by ad channels.

Wrap Up:

Performance Max is an objective-driven campaign type that allows you to access all your Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.

Performance Max campaigns can help you drive performance, delivering more conversions by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding.

So how can you optimize your Performance Max campaigns faster for exponential profits?

There’s an AI-driven tool that can help you track the Performance Max campaigns.

PPC Signal is an AI-driven application you can leverage to drive exponential successful Performance Max campaigns. The easy-to-use application uses advanced algorithms to detect opportunities and risks in your Google Ads account automatically.

No matter how complex or paralyzing your data is, PPC Signal provides actionable observations about positive and negative changes occurring in your Performance Max campaigns.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial to drive exponential success in your Performance Max campaigns.