Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns

In November of 2021, Google announced that performance max campaigns would be coming out of beta, and rolling out to advertiser accounts all over the world. If you haven’t heard of performance max, you’re not alone. I don’t think a lot of people have heard about them.

So in this video, I want to give an overview of what performance max campaigns are and how they work. Give you a rundown of how to set up a performance max campaign. At the end, I’m going to talk about some of the reporting capabilities or shortcomings of the new performance max campaigns.

I first want to talk about what performance max campaigns, are, and I think the best way to do it is to use some of the visuals that Google utilized in their announcement post when they mentioned they’re going to roll it out. So if we scroll down here, we get this graphic that shows a couple of people engaging with a number of different things and different icons. But I think that the best layout for us advertisers is actually probably down here; I’ll make this a little bit bigger so you guys can see it a little bit better.

But effectively, what performance max campaigns are a single campaign type that lets you reach your customers across all of these six different platforms that you see right here. YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.

Currently, to reach people across all these different networks, you would have to create at least one video campaign, one display campaign, one search campaign and then a discover campaign to get in all these different placements. Performance max rolls all of those into one, so that you can reach people across all the networks without having to create all of those different campaign types.

In this announcement post, Google says that these performance max campaigns are meant to complement your regular search campaigns, but additionally, the smart shopping and local campaigns will also eventually roll into a performance max campaign. So if you’re using smart shopping or a local campaign, they will eventually become some form of a performance max campaign, so keep that in mind.

If you want to learn anything more about the case studies that Google used in the beta phase to make the decision to roll this out, you can read this article, and we’ll have it in the description down below. But for now, what I want to do is start getting into the platform and show you how performance max campaigns will show up in your Google ads account. Then we’re going to walk through the setup of a brand-new performance max campaign.

So the first thing to note in this account is that performance max campaigns are truly a new campaign type, as I mentioned. You can see the campaign type column here that we have some listed as search, discovery, display, performance max is an option in that column.

Then over here, in the top left, we have the campaigns broken out by campaign type, and you’ll see that performance max is its own group. Each campaign that you have that is performance max will use this icon next to it, so it’s easier to distinguish which one is a performance max campaign compared to video, search, any of your other campaign types in the account.

So with that out of the way, I want to start creating our first performance max campaign. So if we come over here and click the blue plus button for a new campaign, we’ll just click new, and the first thing we need to do is choose our campaign objective.

For a performance max campaign, you can use one of three different campaign objectives in Google ads; you need to use either sales, leads or local store visits. Any of the other campaign objectives will not let you create a performance max campaign; for right now, I’m just going to go ahead and choose leads.

No matter which objective you choose, Google will then provide you with the conversion goals that it believes would be associated with that campaign objective. You can then adjust the conversion goals that you want to use. Let’s say we don’t want to use phone call leads as a conversion action; you can click the three dots and then click remove.

It’ll then confirm that you want to remove that; for now, I’m just going to say cancel, so that we don’t have any more errors. But if you wanted to add an additional goal, you can come down here and click add goal. You can add in whatever additional conversion actions you want to in here; again, I’ll just leave it as it is for now.

Then once you have your conversion goals set up, we can click continue, and now we get to finalize the campaign type that we want to use. So we have the standard five that have been here before search, display, shopping, video and discovery and performance max is going to be the new one. So since that’s what this video is about, I’m going to click performance max.

You can then give your campaign a name, and since this is a demo video, and I’m not going to launch this, I’m going to ruin all of my best practices, and I’m not going to change that name, because it’s not going to go live anyway. So let’s click continue. Now we’re in the section of the builder where we’ll put together all of the remaining information for the performance max campaigns.

These are going to use this new builder process; it’s a little bit different than some of the other campaigns in the past. The first thing we get to do is choose the average daily budget that we want to have. This is going to operate pretty much the exact same way every other budget does, so I’m just going to put in a placeholder amount, so it won’t throw any errors.

Now, you’ll see off to the right that Google has changed the weekly estimates based on the daily budget that I have here; it’s giving some numbers for conversions, conversion value and even row as. I mean, it’s giving a pretty big range, but it is starting to give you an idea of what it thinks it’s going to be able to do based on the settings that we have here.

Every time we adjust any settings, that weekly estimates number will change, so keep an eye on that as you’re setting up your own campaigns, and make sure that you’re setting things up in a reasonable range.

Next, we get to choose our bidding strategy, and we have a limited list of bidding strategies available for performance max campaigns. You’ll remember from a previous video which you can check out at the top of the screen right now, that Google has a number of different bidding strategies optimizing toward a lot of different objectives.

But with performance max campaigns, you only get two. You can choose to focus on either conversions or conversion value, conversion value was the default, and you’ll see down here at the bottom. This campaign will use maximize conversion value bidding strategy, to get the most value for your budget. You can then set up a target return on ad spend if you want to.

So this is basically the max conversion value bidding strategy with the target row as goal included, but if you wanted to set up a campaign focus just on conversions, now this is basically going to be the maximize conversions bidding strategy, and you still have the option to set a target CPA.

So we no longer have any of the manual bidding options, and we don’t have anything based on impression share, because that wouldn’t make sense because of the networks that this campaign type is going to be on. So you only get maximized conversions and maximize conversion value with the option to set either a target CPA or a target row as goal for your performance max campaigns.

For now, I’m going to leave it as conversions, and I’ll leave the target CPA in place, because again, I’m not going to activate this campaign. So let’s click next and move on to campaign settings.

Pretty standard setup for location and languages; choose the one that makes the most sense; these are going to operate exactly the same way all of your other campaigns do. Then to my irritation, Google likes to add all of these other settings in this tiny little more settings section.

Here, we do have a little bit more control on what we want to do; you can change your ad schedule to be just in the same way you would for any other campaign, you can set it up to run on certain days of the week, hours of the day, customize it to your heart’s content. You can set start and end dates for this campaign, so if you want this to be evergreen, probably leave it as it is. But if you need to schedule it to run for a short period of time, you can use a start and end date for that.

Then I’m going to skip this final URL section for just a second, but we’re going to go to campaign URL options, and this is going to be the exact same tracking setup that we would see for any other campaign. Set up your tracking template; you can add in custom parameters if you want to check out the video on those; you can check out the top of the screen right now.

But all of this is going to be where you can tag your performance max campaigns at the campaign level while you’re setting things up. Then because I clicked on one, I now have to click on more settings again, to bring back this final URL expansion. This one I think is really important, because it’s much different from some of the other campaigns that we’ve seen before.

The landing page options for performance max campaigns are very similar to that of dynamic search ad campaigns. Final URL expansion basically means allow Google to send traffic to the most relevant web page on my site, based on the network, the audience, the search keyword, the video on YouTube that the user was watching, that Google then advertised my business to them, and is trying to bring them to the site.

So, in the same way for a DSA campaign, you might say use my entire website and then serve somebody the pricing page who searches for my type of product or service along with pricing; that pricing page is going to be the best option. So by opting into this, and it is the default that final URL expansion is on. You’re giving Google the option to choose what landing page they want to send your potential customers to.

Depending on how your site is set up, the information that’s on your site, this could be a great option for you. If you don’t have any pages that need to be excluded, and every page does a very good job of portraying your business in a good light, go ahead and leave final URL expansion on. That could be a great tool, and Google might be able to find the right landing page to get people to convert.

But if your website isn’t perfect, like most of us, there are some controls you can have in here. The first is that you can exclude URLs by clicking this button here, and then you can add in either individual URLs, or you can create rules around URL contains, and then different language around that, to exclude different pages from your site in the exact same way you would from a DSA campaign.

So that would still give Google some automated options, but then, you’re just excluding certain URLs. But if you’re not comfortable with that at all, and you want to control all of the landing pages that are used, you’ll need to turn final URL expansion off and then you’ll need to provide the URLs in an upcoming stage that you want to use as your landing pages.

As soon as you click that, you’ll get the little icon here from Google that says this is not a best practice, you’re not going to get good enough results, that may or may not be true, they really just want to be able to control it for you. But overall, this final URL expansion is a big deal, because you want to make sure you’re sending users to good pages on your site that have the calls to action that you need. So depending on how your site is set up, make sure you have this setting correct to get the best results.

Next, let’s move on to the asset group. An asset group is a little bit of a new language, new naming convention for Google, but I want you to think about this as basically an ad unit. In the same way that we have a responsive search ad, or responsive display ad that has a handful of images, a number of different text components, maybe some videos.

An asset group is effectively an ad unit as a full line item that you apply all of those different components to, and then Google will dynamically create your ad from that asset group depending on what network it’s trying to show your ad. So at the top, you can give it a name; again, I’m going to skip that because we’re not going to launch it anyway.

But then, this asset builder here is going to look like a big combination of all of the different campaign types we have on Google, because that’s literally what a performance max campaign is. The first thing we’re able to do is put in a final URL, but you will see that the language here says URL expansion is on. What that means is that your URL may be replaced if Google finds a better landing page. So it doesn’t mean it’s always going to be replaced, you still give a landing page. But in certain instances, Google might pick a different page.

So for now, just so we don’t have any errors, I’m going to go ahead and add in our website. Now we can start to add a number of the other components. So the next one is going to be images; we can add up to 15 images, and here, you’ll see the different image guidelines.

We can use a landscape or a square, or an optional portrait image, and all of the different ad sizes are available right here; I’m not going to go through each of those, but they are going to be very similar to the ones that you’ll see for other campaign types, because again this is just a conglomeration campaign type of all of the other campaigns available on the Google network.

The next component that you can use are going to be your logos, and you can add up to five. Again, you can see all of the different guidelines here you can use square or landscape to make sure that you’ve got your logo in place.

The next component is going to be videos, and you can add up to five available. It says if you don’t have one, Google will create videos automatically when possible. So Google is going to take a number of the components that you give them, likely your logos, images and is going to create videos for you if you don’t have any available. Then in the pop-up window here, it basically gives you the same rundown I just did.

But the piece that’s the most important in my mind is the one at the bottom, that says you can replace automatically created videos with your own videos at any time. So even if you don’t have a video right now, you can still launch a performance max campaign, they’ll create a video for you. Then once you have one, you can come in here, upload it, remove the automatically created video if you don’t like it or keep it, and you can customize your ads after the fact.

So that takes care of all of the visual components of the ads, the next few parts are going to be just the text sections that we would put in place. So we have the headlines, we can use up to five headlines here, and they’re all going to use the same 30 character max that we would see for search campaigns or display campaigns.

Next, we can use the long headlines, which are going to be the same type of thing we would use for a responsive display ad. These are going to be up to 90 characters, and you can add up to five of these. Then finally, we have the descriptions, and it says that we need to add one 60-character description, and up to four other descriptions.

So this short description is going to be only 60 characters, this is going to be a bit shorter than search campaigns for the description, but also a bit longer than some of the headlines. We need to have at least one short description, then we can add up to four regular lengths 90-character descriptions.

So, in the same way we’ve talked about responsive search ads, responsive display ads and other videos on this channel, try and put together the components of these ads, whether it’s headline, long headline, short or regular descriptions that try to complement each other and can be put together in any order or any placement, and still make sense to your customer.

Finally, down at the bottom, we have a couple different options here. This is going to feel a little bit more like a social channel, but we can add a call to action on our different ads. So here we can see that it’s going to default to automated. But if you want to choose the different call to action you use. You can select from this list of learn more, get a quote, subscribe, shop now.

This is probably best to keep automated if you use the final URL expansion, because if Google picks a different page other than your landing page, your calls to action could be out of sync with each other and then if you set this up to get a quote, but the landing page that Google chose doesn’t have anywhere to get a quote, it’s a bit disjointed for the customer.

But if you’re controlling all the different landing pages you’re using, it’s a little bit easier to feel confident coming in here and just selecting get quote because then it’s going to always be that based on the landing pages that you have. Then lastly, you can add your business name down here at the bottom, so whatever you would want that to show up as.

Then we have more options where that just really covers the display path. So if you wanted to have some sort of controlled path after your main website display URL, you can adjust that here and you can decide to use a different final URL for mobile. Only a couple additional settings, but you do get some customization there.

So now we have our campaign settings, we’ve got our ad creative in place, the next section is going to be the part that tells Google who you want to target with this performance max campaign. This is going to be a unique setup compared to any of the other campaign types that we have available; it’s going to use an audience signal.

So what this does is you start by giving Google an audience that you think you want to target, and then it will use that as a direction to then target people like that, and also find new users that it thinks are similar to target with the performance max campaign. So just as a quick visual, if I click to see how it works option, this is basically what it’s going for.

So you would utilize this audience signal that you would create over here on the left, Google will then put it through its automated filter, and it’s going to find other users who might engage in the same types of things. It’s going to feel similar to a look-alike audience, and that’s because it kind of is. It’s going to function in a very similar way to what those look-alike audiences do on all the different social platforms.

So the way to get started here is to put together the audience signal, or as we would say it for any of the look-alike audiences, the root or seed audience that creates that model. So let’s go ahead and create an audience signal for this group. Just like with everything else, the first thing we can do is give it a name, and now it has one, so we don’t get any more errors moving forward.

Then we have four areas where we can start to add groups of users based on different targeting options in Google ads, to create this audience signal. The first is going to be custom segments; next is your data, which is basically your remarketing lists. Third, are the interests and detailed demographics, and then fourth are going to be the more basic demographics that you can use.

So this video is already getting a little bit long, and I think we have better-dedicated videos to each of these different areas, so I’m not going to go into these too much in-depth right now, but I will give a quick overview. These more general demographics down here at the bottom, these are going to be the more foundational pieces. You can have your gender, age and then your parental status, and then household income available.

So opt into any of these that you think are what your target persona would look like. Because that’s basically what an audience signal is. You’re just creating a persona for Google to use and go find additional people. So that one’s relatively quick.

We actually just launched a new video recently on custom segments, because these have been updated a little bit, and you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. But effectively, what we’re doing is we’re creating a custom segment based on people’s search activity, the apps or websites they’ve visited around the web that you don’t own, to create a customer profile that we can target here.

Once you’re ready to add a custom segment, you can come into this box here. You can either add custom segments that you’ve already built, or you can come over here and create a new custom segment from scratch and apply it to the campaign. Once you’re ready to apply them to the campaign, you can choose either one or two or a handful of different custom segments to add to your campaign.

The next section is going to be based on your data, and these are going to be people who have interacted with your business. So if you hover over this, they are formerly called remarketing and customer match lists, which is funny because nobody formerly calls them that, we still very much call them that. But they include people who have visited or interacted with your website, your app, a customer list and different ways that they’ve engaged with you across the different Google platforms where you own that signal.

So once you’re ready to add this audience, it’s going to be pretty similar to what we did with custom segments. You can come in here and search for a specific list, or you can browse based on the website users, YouTube users, customer lists, or you can create a new data list in audience manager from scratch, if you want to do that as well.

For now, I’ll just leave that section blank, so we don’t have to blur anything else out. Then lastly, you can use interests and detailed demographics. So these are going to be based on people’s interests, life events, and the different, more detailed demographics that Google knows about them. So this is where we get our in-market life events and other sections here.

So if we click into this, the functionality is going to be the same where you can search for those individual groups, and it’ll tell you the type that each one is whenever you’re trying to search for them. Or you can browse from the list of again in-market, life events, detailed demographics or affinity segments.

If you want a better overview of what all of these different things are and what’s available, we do have a Google targeting option video that you can check out at the top of the screen right now.

So as you can see, this is a very customized audience signal that we’re putting together based on segments, remarketing lists, demographics, interests, to come up with a single signal, a single root audience that Google is then going to use to find people who are part of that group, but then also find people who behave similarly to different aspects of that group, to serve your ad to from your performance max campaigns.

Although, we don’t control all the targeting in the way we would for other campaigns, this audience signal is a very important portion of the performance max campaign setup, because you’re basically telling Google exactly who you want to find, and it’s going to use this to go out and try and generate new customers for you.

So make sure that you’re putting this together as well as you can, maybe test a few different angles on your persona and see what works best. Once you have your audience signal the way that you want it, you just come down here and click save, and now you can see that that audience signal has been added to the campaign.

You can switch audience signals if you have created multiple different options, but now we have at least something that we’re going to go on, and Google will be able to find people who behave similar to those lists that I added in there.

So we have one more section that we need to take care of, and that’s going to be extensions. These will function very similarly to how they do for your search campaigns. It’s going to start off for me with the call, lead form and site link extensions, because I chose the lead campaign type.

But you can add all of the other extension types, whether it’s structured snippet, price, promotion, or call out to your campaigns, and you can choose from the drop-down, you can create new, this entire builder makes it very easy for you to get all the extensions that you need in place.

Since all of your ads can run from performance max campaigns on the search network, make sure that you have all of your ad extensions set up in exactly the same way with best practices that you would for a standard search campaign, to make sure that your ads look as good as they can, they give your customers all the information they need to decide if they want to learn more about you and potentially work with you.

For now, I’m just going to click next; we’ll go to the summary here you can see that I have absolutely sped through this whole setup, I have not done due diligence on things, so I’m getting an error for the asset groups, because I didn’t add any assets that would be a problem.

But effectively if you’ve done your due diligence and you’re ready to launch the campaign, you can review everything that you have available here make sure everything is set up appropriately, and then you’ll click publish campaign and you’ll be off to the races.

The last thing I want to cover for performance max campaigns are going to be the different reporting options we have available, because they are a bit different than other campaigns. At the highest level, since performance max campaigns are a completely unique campaign type, you can scroll all the way down to the bottom on any of your different pages, and see the performance of performance max campaigns versus the other campaign types.

So if I scroll all the way down here, I have the account broken out, you’ll see here all the different light items for the different metrics based on search, display all the way down to performance max campaigns.

So you can see the performance at a really high level of how those are performing compared to other campaign types. But within performance max campaigns, we have a few different options available, and they’re relatively limited. So I’m going to click into a performance max campaign and show you what I’m talking about.

When you click into a performance max campaign, it’s going to land you on the overview tab, and it’ll give you the insights into performance that you would likely see on maybe the ad groups or keywords tab within a display or search campaign. Got a quick view of the goals and the bidding strategy being used, and then this is the area where you’re going to see performance for the whole campaign.

As normal, you can adjust the date range, look at a few different stats, all that good stuff. Then rather than go through each of the different adjustments that we see down here at the bottom, I’m just going to go through the navigation on the left-hand side.

Going through the ones that are going to be the most similar to other campaigns, ad schedule locations and settings are all going to function the same way they would for any other campaign, you can always go in and check it out, and adjust your locations or schedule the way that you need to. Or go back and adjust your campaign settings for performance max campaigns.

The first area where we start to see a little less information come through is going to be around extensions. So if I click here, you’ll see that it has the different extensions that are added to this campaign, but I don’t see any performance. Then if I come in here and click on site link, you’ll see that we’re given the full link of sitelink extensions that are used in this campaign, what it’s added to, the level, and if it’s approved or not. That’s it, we don’t get to see what the site link performance is within this specific campaign, which sucks.

So unlike in other search campaigns where you can navigate in and see how different site links or call out extensions or structured snippets are performing, we don’t get to see that for performance max campaigns; you’ll just get to see where it’s applied and if it’s approved.

Then, unfortunately, the other two areas of reporting for performance max campaigns aren’t much better. So the first I’m going to look at is going to be asset groups, and I’ll apologize a lot of this is going to have to be blurred out. But effectively, you can see the asset groups that you’re using and then you can get some insight into how they’re performing.

The biggest insight is that the ad strength is poor, that’s kind of the biggest thing that Google is going to tell us. But we can view details over here and get a little bit more insight, but again it comes back to the same type of reporting that we would see for a smart display campaign or responsive ads where it only shows performance as good, best, pending, poor, any of those different setups.

When we’re looking at the actual performance for the assets and trying to decide what to use, we’re really not going to get very much in terms of actual performance stats; we’re just going to get these directional signals from Google from performance max campaigns. Just like with responsive search ads, we can come in here and see the combinations that are showing up.

But unlike responsive search ads, we don’t even get to see the number of impressions that are showing up for each of these; we just get to see the top combinations for images. Then if I scroll down, you can see the top text only combinations and what those looked like, and these are just the ones that served the most. We don’t even know if they had the most conversions, highest click-through rate any of that. This is the reporting that we get on it.

Then lastly, we can use the insights tab to get ideas about the target audience, and this is pretty much all we get. Your customer spotlight, who’s engaging with your campaign. It’ll tell you a tiny little insight here as to who’s converting the best, it’ll give some recommendations off to the right, and it’ll show you the top-performing audience segments based on your campaigns.

The information you get here are the audience segments themselves, the type of segments and the share of conversions for the campaign. Then the index to show how strong of affinity there is between this audience, and the people who convert, compared to the general target audience for the entire web, that’s pretty much it.

You can kind of reverse engineer what number of conversions each of these audiences drove because you know your total conversions, and you can see a share of conversions here. But these are really the only insights we get for performance max campaigns. If you’re expecting a lot of insights and a lot of takeaways, and a lot of performance stats, these are not the campaigns for you, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t perform well.

As you can tell, performance max campaigns are quite a bit different than the other formats, because they really are taking so many components from every other campaign type, and mashing them all into one, and then not really giving us a lot of performance stats to try and optimize on, which sucks.

But as we’ve said, multiple times on this channel, there are always going to be changes happening, and there are always going to be new campaign types, targeting options, and some of the control levers that we have are going to be removed. Unfortunately, that’s just the state of online advertising at the moment.

So rather than trying to hold on tight to the controls that you’ve had before, we encourage you to test things out, see how it works, what insights can you get, and how can you best leverage the different tools that the channels are providing us, to get the best results for your clients or for your business, because you’re going to be ahead of the curve if you’ve already tested out these campaigns and you have some understanding of what’s coming down the pipe. and your competitors don’t.

Overall, performance max campaigns have performed relatively well in some of the accounts that I’ve seen them in. Even if I don’t like the fact that I don’t have quite as much control as I do for other campaigns, it’s hard to argue with getting conversions across an entire Google-owned property system at a price that you’re willing to pay.

Hopefully, I’ve given you a little bit more confidence to go in, set up your first performance max campaign, start getting some stats in, and you can find out if they work well for you or if you need to stick to the standard campaign types and have a little bit more control with different search and display and YouTube campaigns.

Google did mention in their announcement that they’re rolling this out to advertisers worldwide, they didn’t really give a good timeline on it; check back in your campaigns, you’ll be able to see if you can create performance max campaigns by just trying to create a new campaign and choosing either the sales, leads or local campaign type, and if performance max comes up, you’ve got it.

If it doesn’t, you don’t have it yet. So check back, get some campaigns, and then I would love to hear what your experience is with them once you get your first campaign set up.

Feel free to come back, leave us a note in the comments about what you’re seeing, what you like, what you don’t like and maybe give some tips of what you’ve learned to help out other folks that are watching the video and trying to dip in for the first time as well.

Written by Michelle Morgan