Performance Max campaigns: performance beyond keywords

What are Google Performance Max campaigns?

Google Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that gives you access to the entire Google Ads inventory from a single place. In practice, you run one goal-based campaign across every available channel: Search, Display, Discover, Gmail, YouTube and Maps. These campaigns are designed to work alongside keyword-based Search campaigns, while Shopping and Local campaigns will also be folded into Performance Max.

If you are wondering why Google launched this new campaign type, there is a simple reason. The algorithm is taking over! As the name suggests, Performance Max uses state-of-the-art machine learning to get the maximum out of your campaigns.

Have questions? See the official information here on the Performance Max campaign type.

How is Performance Max different?

Performance Max is a revolutionary step in search advertising, mainly because it aims for full automation and maximum campaign performance against your marketing goals.

Fully automated campaigns let you cut the manual work of optimising campaigns substantially. That leaves you more time to put your energy into strategy and creative.

Online consumer behaviour has become almost impossible to predict, and the pandemic made online marketing more volatile than ever.

According to Google, Performance Max campaigns will allow marketers “not to try to predict the future, but to be ready for it”:

“If change is the challenge, automation is the solution for staying ahead of constant shifts in consumer demand.” - Eduardo Indacochea, Senior Director, Google

How does Performance Max work?

The main advantage of Performance Max campaigns is that they rely on artificial intelligence to identify and decide which combination of your creatives is most likely to generate conversions across Google’s inventory.

In short, you upload all your creative assets and copy at once and set your marketing goals (conversions, traffic and so on).

Google then determines the audience based on audience signals, historical data, user data and how those users behave across Google’s advertising channels.

Performance Max: a case study

Our team of Google Ads experts tested Performance Max campaigns as soon as they launched.

A few weeks before the launch, our client’s campaigns had started to lose performance. There were many reasons: tougher competition, the impact of the pandemic, less time to adapt to change and more.

We already knew from the initial beta that Performance Max helps, so the moment it launched we switched to this new campaign type.

Results before Performance Max

Here is the situation just before we implemented Performance Max campaigns:

As the chart above shows, in the first two months of 2022 we were running standard Search campaigns for our client, but their performance kept declining.

We worked hard to keep return on ad spend positive so the client could carry on scaling. At that point, overall Google Ads return on ad spend (ROAS) had dropped to 22.85, which was barely break-even ROAS.

We needed to lift the account’s performance so it would record more conversions and we could keep scaling.

Implementing Performance Max

We built the campaign with the best-performing creatives from the other campaigns. Assets from successful campaigns went in (including the video and display campaigns, plus the Merchant Center feed). We used these asset groups (copy and descriptions) to highlight the promotional offers as clearly as possible, and relied on machine learning to target the best audience.

In short:

• Lots of image and video variations went in, so Google could mix them and find the best match.
• We tested a large number of ad headlines, long headlines and different descriptions.
• The Merchant Center product feed let us attach specific products to the campaign.
• We also optimised the Merchant Center product feed to make the products more relevant to user searches.
• Audience signals told the algorithm which audiences were most valuable. In this case: past buyers, product viewers, users who abandoned their basket and so on.

What were the results?

Results after using Performance Max:

Performance Max improved our overall results straight away, with huge conversion value in just the first two months and a ROAS of 88.42, while the account’s average ROAS rose to 39.05.

In the second half of Q1 performance was good, above our initial conversion targets, with the Performance Max campaign contributing a significant share of the total revenue generated by the client’s online store.

A few Google Performance Max tips

Artificial intelligence immediately began to prove its superiority in driving online sales. For that reason, we made Performance Max a core part of our Google marketing objectives.

After a few months of experimenting with conversion goals, asset groups and audience segments, we want to share some of our conclusions.

Use audience signals

Audience signals are an optional feature you should use if you have enough information about the audience most likely to convert.

The feature works with all audience segments, including first-party data and custom audiences, as well as participants, YouTube subscribers and more.

If you have enough data to import these segments, you will help the algorithm find similar users across Google’s platforms.

This way, Google will not go too “broad” and is more likely to target high-intent prospects. It also helps speed up the campaign’s learning curve.

Test every possible creative combination

The more elements you add to the campaign, the more data Google has to experiment with and learn from.

So do not be afraid to add as many copy variations as you can, for both headlines and descriptions. Google will combine the ones that perform best.

Make the most of your strongest creatives, copy and CTAs. Remember, too, that you can reuse the best-performing ads from previous campaigns (already tried and tested).

Finally, make sure you add both images and video. It is the only way to reach both responsive display ads (Google Display Network) and Google’s YouTube inventory.

Check that conversion goals are being tracked

Make sure your conversion goals work and are tracked correctly. Otherwise, you may find discrepancies between campaign performance and actual results.

Ideally, you want at least 30 conversions recorded in your account over the last 30 days for the best optimisation and results.

If you fall short of these benchmarks, Google’s algorithm will struggle to identify winning combinations and/or customer patterns.

Set up your product feed in GMC (Google Merchant Center)

If you run an online store, make sure you have a product feed set up in Google Merchant Center.

This lets you advertise on Google Shopping as well, which puts your products in front of a much wider audience.

How do you make Google Shopping ads stand out with Performance Max?

Simple. Optimise your images, product titles and descriptions in Merchant Center to make your products as relevant as possible to user searches.

⛔ WARNING ⛔

There is one mistake we have learned to avoid when using Performance Max for e-commerce. You can use the “Expand final URL” feature to send traffic to the pages on your site that are most likely to convert. However, if you run the campaign with a specific landing page (for example, a special offer or pages leading to lead generation forms), make sure this option is turned off. If you do not, you may send traffic to other pages on the site that have nothing to do with the one you want your customers to land on.

The future is here!

Like it or not, Performance Max will be used extensively. This campaign type is probably just the beginning of Google relying on AI to solve a whole range of privacy and data tracking problems. So adapt well to Google’s new model and get a generous head start on your competitors.

Have you tried Google Performance Max campaigns yet? How did they work for you? Leave us a comment below!