How to Create a Performance Max Campaign
How to Create a Performance Max Campaign
The consumer journey is constantly evolving, and growing increasingly complex too.
With so many ways to discover, research and purchase, customers are engaging across an ever-growing number of channels. It can be hard to keep up with these changes, which is why so many advertisers are turning to automation in order to engage customers in an effective and appropriately scaled way.
What is Performance Max?
Performance Max is a goal-based type of campaign that works across all Google Ads channels.
Performance Max uses the best of Google’s automation capabilities, including Smart Bidding, to help you drive better performance and discover more converting customers across Google’s advertising channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
Expanding across channels ensures that you are reaching as many valuable customers as you possibly can. It also helps you to maximise performance, thanks to the array of ad inventory and formats available from Google Ads.
Performance Max combines you goals and inputs with the power of automation to help you respond – in real time – to dynamic shifts in consumer demand.
This enables you to invest where there are new conversion opportunities, regardless of which channel they’re on.
How to Create and Manage a Performance Max Campaign
Creating and managing a performance max campaign is a simple process.
At the same time, you need to provide automation with the right resources in order to drive the best results.
Getting started with your first campaign
In Google Ads, select your main campaign objective and the conversion goals you want to drive performance towards.
At this stage, the goals you select will be the primary optimization target for your Performance Max campaign.
Here, you have the option to prioritise certain goals over others, which can be set or adjusted as you see fit. Once you’ve set up your conversion goals, select ‘Performance Max’ as your campaign type, to access all Google Ads channels and inventory from a single campaign.
Budget and Bidding
Once you’ve done this, you’ll be directed to the Budget and Bidding section, where you’ll be prompted to select a budget and bid strategy for your campaign.
Here, you must ensure that your bid strategy aligns with your business objectives.
For instance, if you are focused on maximising conversion value and different types of conversions generate different values for your business, select ‘Conversion value.’
If you’re focused on maximising conversions, select ‘Conversions’ from the dropdown menu. We suggest selecting this bid strategy if all of your conversions are worth the same to your business.
Eventually, budget and target forecasts will become available. These will help to help guide you in making budgeting and bidding decisions.
You can also add a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) or Return-on-Ad-Spend (ROAS) target to your bid strategy.
Not sure where to start?
A helpful reference point is your average CPA or ROAS from the last 30 days on comparable campaigns that are optimised using the same conversion goals. The campaign may also auto-suggest a CPA or ROAS target based on your historical account performance. You can either use the auto-suggested option, or edit the number based on your preferences.
Campaign Settings
Once you’ve set your bid strategy and targets, you’ll then be able to select your campaign’s location and language settings. You can also adjust other settings, such as ad serving schedule or start and end date.
Tracking template and final URL suffix settings are also available here. It’s recommended to leave final URL expansion ‘On’ in order to ensure you are driving maximum coverage on relevant search queries.
The Final URL Expansion feature helps you to show up on additional searches that have a strong likelihood of leading to conversions. It uses landing page content across your website to dynamically customise headlines for your ads (if you wish, you can exclude certain landing pages from your website if they are not required).
Performance Max should always be run in correspondence with your core, keyword-based Search campaigns.
The Final URL Expansion feature helps you to find new, converting search queries that aren’t covered by your keyword-based Search campaigns, or where your Performance Max campaign has a higher Ad rank. It then matches these new queries to relevant landing pages on your website. What’s more, the Negative Keywords feature enables you to exclude certain keywords from your Performance Max campaigns.
Assets
You will need to provide a high-quality variety of assets if your campaign is to be a success.
Asset Groups allow you to manage a variety of creative assets. Your assets include:
· The final URL or landing page that you would like to send your customers to
· Images
· Logos
· Videos
· Headlines
· Text headlines and descriptions
· Call-to-action
You can create multiple asset groups per campaign.
Performance Max automatically assembles assets into all ad formats that are relevant to your conversion goals. By providing more assets, your campaign will benefit from a wider range of ad formats. This also enables you to drive more conversions.
The Ad Strength Indicator shows you the strength of your ad, and methods you can adopt to improve your assets. Because automation and machine learning perform better when they have a variety of high-quality assets to work with, it’s best to provide as many assets as you can.
Audience Signals
Finally, Performance Max campaigns help you find new, valuable customers, and do not limit your ads to a specific/select set of audiences. That being said, you can use the Audience Signals feature to guide automated targeting and ensure the right ad is served to the right audience.
Once all of the above is done, you’re ready to run your campaign!
Give it a few weeks to evaluate results. Keep an eye on your campaign to ensure it’s running correctly.
Here at EWM, we’re experts on running effective and successful ad campaigns.
Contact EWM today to discover how we can help you to create targeted, powerful Performance Max campaigns.