A Guide to Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max is all the rage on Google. It hit the ground running for all of our eCom clients across the beauty, fashion, and home industries. Note: Performance Max is currently under beta and only open to certain advertisers. If you want to opt-in Performance Max campaign, you need to meet the following criteria:
✓ Your account-level goal has to be leads or online sales
✓ You don't have Google Merchant Center product feed in your account (this factor might change in the future)
✓ You have a dedicated account manager who can help you to check your eligibility.
Performance Max was designed to complement the keyword-based Search campaigns. Primarily, its purpose is to help advertisers find more prospects across all of Google's placements, including the platforms YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and even Maps.
In Our Experience, What Makes PMax Special:
Performance Max, in its simplest setup, is a one-size-fits-all campaign type. It gives you access to all of Google Ads inventory and requires the least amount of work. Just provide up to 15 images, 5 logos, 5 headlines, 5 long headlines, 5 descriptions, and Google will do the rest.
Then, its machine learning systems will automatically serve the responsive ads across their inventory using automated Smart Bidding based on the goal the advertiser sets. That means you don't need to design specialized ads for specific placements!
How Is This Different Than Other Smart Campaigns?
Audience targeting is different: Google automates the targeting and optimizes the delivery based on the audience that the advertiser provides.
Campaign structure is different: Instead of ad group level and ad level, Performance Max uses a slightly different setting. Campaign > Asset Group. The asset group is very similar to responsive display assets.
Bidding Strategies are limited to goal-based strategies: Since it's a performance-based campaign type, only Maximum Conversion, Target CPA, Maximum ROAS, and target ROAS are available.
A solution for efficiency: We created Performance Max campaigns targeting DMAs that were not performing well in search & video formats. It turns out these campaigns achieve a 30% decrease in CPA within the assigned budget.
What DTC Brands Should Use Performance Max?
Performance Max will show as a campaign type selection if your marketing objective is:
Sales
Leads
Local store visits and promotions
Create a campaign without a goal's guidance
This type of campaign is suitable for the following advertisers:
Advertisers who have limited budget but want exposure to all Google Ads inventory.
Advertisers who have an unlimited budget and want to unlock new, unexpected customer segments.
Advertisers who wish to explore new Geo markets.
What Optimization Will I Be Able To Make?
Increasing / decreasing your ROAS target
Seasonal Bid Adjustments
Changing the budget
Creating asset groups
Improving your content assets
Splitting products into different campaigns
Excluding products
Final URL expansion: on or off?
Removing all assets to focus on Shopping Ads
Here Are The Optimizations That Have Worked Well For Our Clients:
1) Creating Asset Groups
If you are running Performance Max across all placements, meaning you want ads to show on Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, etc., then feeding your campaign with good creatives is key.
Asset groups is a way to group your products, ad copy, banners, video, and audience signals together.
Let’s take an example of facial cleanser and daily spf.
Asset Group: facial cleanser
Products:
facial cleanser
Ad Copy
Daily foaming cleanser
For dry & sensitive skin
Acne-safe daily wash
Loved by thousands
Clinically tested
MD approved and recommended
URL: yourbrand.com/facial-cleanser
Banners:
Something focused on facial cleanser
Videos
Something focused on facial cleanser
Audience Signals
skincare
wellness
Now for the SPF:
Products:
SPF
Ad Copy
100% Mineral-based SPF
Prevent Skin Damage
Reef safe
Loved by thousands
MD approved and recommended
URL: yourbrand.com/facial-spf
Banners:
Something focused on spf
Videos
Something focused on spf
Audience Signals
skincare
wellness
Could we have come up with ad copy for both that would fit? Definitely. Could we have linked users to the homepage that portrays both cleanser and spf? Yup.
Is it better to split it into different asset groups? Without a doubt.
How much you should split up your asset groups depends on your business.
If you are a skincare brand, you can afford to split up your asset groups as diligently as above.
The level of detail depends on how broad your company goes.
2) Improve Your Content Assets
If you are running a full Performance Max setup, then improving assets should be a key optimization tactic for you:
Text assets
Images / banners
Videos
The challenge with Performance Max is that you can’t tell how important it is to improve each of these assets. If you are spending less than 1% of your budget on YouTube, then improving your video assets would prove a waste of time.
If I had to prioritize, then I would:
Start with my text assets. You can improve these quickly yourself, and most of your ad spend (related to assets) will be focused on text ads anyway.
Improve my images / banners. These take a bit longer since you need designers involved, but they are still faster than videos and you are more likely to see direct conversions from remarketing on the Display network than video.
We would rarely spend time creating high-quality video assets for Performance Max.
The last point might be a bit of a stretch. We can’t can’t imagine taking the time it takes to create high-quality videos and then just plump them into a Performance Max campaign where we have no control over how much budget it spends and on what channels.
3) Split Products into Different Campaigns
This is the biggest optimization tactic that most advertisers don’t seem to do.
You should split your campaigns if you:
Want to set a different ROAS target for different product segments.
Want to set a different budget for different product segments.
We implemented Custom Labels to analyze whether products on sale converted better than products not on sale. What we found was more than 50% of our spend went on products not on sale, and ROAS was half of products on sale.
4) Remove All Assets to Focus on Shopping Ads
This is a trick that’s been confirmed to work by many marketers and we’re finding similar results.
Create a new Performance Max campaign to compliment your ‘catch-all’ and only show ads that are related to the Shopping Ads ad format. Compare how this stacks up against your catch-all to see how important the shopping component is.
