Performance Max campaigns are a new campaign type in Google Ads in which advertisers can create one campaign and get their ads wherever users are interacting with Google’s services, whether that’s on Search, Display, YouTube, Maps, Discover, or Gmail.
It promises to simplify advertising in a world where user behavior has become more fragmented. It’s an especially appealing promise for new advertisers who may have not known where to start with Google Ads.
But for existing advertisers, the introduction of yet another campaign type may be confusing. So here I’ll shed some light on how to think about Performance Max.
I also got a chance to speak to Google about it where they shared some best practices and even answered several FAQs from the PPC community. Here’s the full conversation:
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Is Performance Max Replacing Other Campaigns?
At the end of September 2022, Performance Max replaced Smart Shopping and Local campaigns. Other campaign types will continue to exist until further notice according to Google.
Where Do Performance Max Campaigns Run?
Performance Max provides the equivalent of running the following current Google Ads campaign types: Search, Display, Shopping, Video, Gmail, and Discovery. It can then place ads across Google’s vast number of pages and properties as shown below.
**Source**: Google
What Do the Experts Say About Running Performance Max Instead of Other Campaigns?
As of writing this blog post, Performance Max campaigns have been around for over a year. Many advertisers have tested the campaign type, ran experiments with it, and learned a lot in the process.
I got a chance to speak to Menachem Ani and Andrew Lolk, two experts and practitioners on PPC Town Hall 71 to understand what they’ve learned from running Performance Max campaigns for a full year.
They’ve covered a wide range of topics from structuring asset groups to attribution and negative keywords.
Watch the full conversation below.
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What Inputs Do I Have With Performance Max Campaigns?
When setting up a Performance Max campaign, Google will ask you to provide the following inputs to help their artificial intelligence get started with good ads:
Your marketing objectives and goals
Budget
Creative assets including text, images, and video (optional, since this will auto-generate)
Geo-targets
Optional Feeds such as Google My Business, Google Merchant Center, Dynamic Ads Feed, and Business Data Feeds
Optional Audience Signals such as First-Party Audiences (including Remarketing Lists) and Google Audiences (including Custom Audiences)
With that information, automation is off to the races and will try to show your ad where it expects it may lead to a conversion.
Latest updates to Performance Max (as of February 2023)
Google announced some major updates to Performance Max on February 23, 2023, to provide greater control, flexibility, and insights to advertisers.
Here is the list of updates:
Campaign-level brand exclusions
Page feeds to refine Search inventory results
Video creation tools
Additional reporting available at the asset group level, along with budget pacing
In this article, you’ll learn how to manage and optimize your Performance Max for Retail campaigns. You’ll discover some great Optmyzr tools and strategies to make the most of your advertising budget and achieve your marketing goals.
Let’s get started.
Manage account structure and keep it in sync with your feed
The first step in managing your Performance Max campaigns is creating a structure that works best for your business goals. Use the Shopping Campaign Builder and refresher to create a campaign structure that is in sync with your Merchant feed. This will ensure that your products are always up-to-date and your campaigns are optimized for performance.
You can also add assets like images and videos to your campaigns to make them more appealing to your audience.
View and analyze the performance of your products
Once you have set up your Performance Max campaigns, use the Shopping Analysis tool to analyze the performance of your products. This tool tells you which ROAS bracket your product belongs to, which helps you identify how your brand is performing.
You can also use Rule Engine to get alerted on how the performance of your products changes over time. This helps you optimize your campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
You can also use the Shopping Feed Audits to enhance your Performance Max campaigns. The audits will help in pinpointing problematic products, such as those priced higher than the market benchmark price or the ones that have been disapproved because of some quality violations.
For example, the tool can identify products lacking required attributes like ‘Brand’. Once you’ve identified the issues, you can resolve them in the Google Merchant Center.
The Performance Max Channel Distribution widget on the Account Dashboard allows you to visualize the performance of your campaigns based on channels. You can view the performance of all campaigns across four channels: Shopping, Display, Video, and Other (which comprises Search, Gmail, Discovery, and Maps).
Moreover, you can also view the performance classification for each campaign using this widget.
Optimize campaign targets for better performance
Your campaign goals will determine the targets you set for your Performance Max campaigns. If you want to increase your reach, you should decrease your target ROAS. This will allow your ads to reach a wider audience and increase your brand visibility.
On the other hand, if you want to generate more revenue, you should increase your target ROAS. This will help you reach your most valuable customers and generate more sales. This can be done automatically based on performance data using Rule Engine.
Manage campaign budget for better performance
Finally, it’s important to regularly analyze the performance of your listing groups and exclude those that are not performing well. This will ensure that your campaigns are optimized for performance and that your budget is being spent on the most valuable products.
By excluding underperforming listing groups, you can prevent them from dragging down the overall performance of your campaigns.
If you want to keep an eye on your Retail Performance Max campaign budgets and prevent overspending, you can set up a multi-account budget alert. This feature lets you group together the budgets you want to monitor and set a ‘spend cap’ for them.
Once the monthly budget target is reached, you can opt to receive a notification or pause the relevant campaigns. When the new budget cycle starts, the paused campaigns will resume automatically. This way, you can avoid overspending and ensure that your Performance Max campaigns stay within their allocated budgets.
Targets and exclusions to focus on what matters
Managing Performance Max campaigns requires you to regularly analyze and optimize them. Focus on optimizing placements and locations, adding custom segments to asset groups, and managing audience signals to achieve maximum performance.
To exclude low-performing placements, use the Account level placement exclusion feature to quickly exclude mobile apps, YouTube videos & channels, and websites with no conversions. You can also automate this optimization using the Rule Engine to exclude placements every month.
You can also exclude expensive locations, once again, with the Rule Engine to identify and exclude cities, zip codes, or regions that are accruing costs but not converting for your Performance Max campaigns.
Check broken URLs for Performance Max asset groups with the URL checker.
The URL checker helps in checking broken URLs for asset groups and sitelinks used in Performance Max . You can choose to pause the asset groups with a text like “product not found” or “out of stock” and get notified about the same to ensure better user experience on your website.
Adjust bids for different parts of the day with the Hour of the Week Bidder.
The Hour of the Week Bidder helps you make bid adjustments for different parts of the day and decide when to show your ads. Performance Max campaigns do not support bid adjustments, however, this tool can help in setting up the ad scheduling for your campaigns and gives you the flexibility to show your ads on a particular day and time of the week.
One more way to improve the performance of your campaigns
You can also use a new Express optimization, ‘Asset groups with no Audience Signal’ to find the asset groups without any audience signal and add recommended search terms that your ideal customers are looking for, or add keywords describing your customer’s interests.
Open the black box of Performance Max
Managing Performance Max for Retail campaigns requires a strategic approach and a commitment to analyzing and optimizing your campaigns. We hope that by following the tips outlined above, you can create campaigns that are optimized for performance and deliver the results you need to grow your business.
And if you want to start optimizing your Performance Max campaigns right away, take a 14-day free trial now.
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Since its launch, Performance Max — the one campaign to rule them all — has seen widespread adoption among advertisers from various verticals.
What is Performance Max anyway?
Performance Max is a new campaign type in Google Ads in which you create one campaign and Google promotes your ads wherever your users are interacting with its services — Search, Display, YouTube, Maps, Discover, or Gmail.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how advertisers in ecommerce and retail specifically should approach this campaign type to drive better results.
P.S. We also spoke to two of the best experts in ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Menachem Ani, on PPC Town Hall 59 on the same topic. You can watch the full episode below:
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Smart Shopping Campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max
Smart Shopping and Local campaigns have been automatically upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022.
How to structure your Performance Max campaign?
Your campaign structure should be aligned with your client’s goal.
If your client has a low SKU-volume store with maybe five or ten products, you may create one campaign with one or two asset groups. If they have a larger store with hundreds or thousands of products, you could split it out a bit more into separate themes for more control over what products are taking up the bulk of the ad spend.
Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce presented the following approach.
He says that if you’re new or are still testing Performance Max you can take a simpler approach to structure your campaign and move towards a more granular approach as you learn going forward.
If your objective is margins, Mike says you could try the following approach.
**Source**: Smarter Ecommerce
Tips for Performance Max bidding strategies.
The bidding strategy that you should use will depend on how much data Google’s systems have about your campaign.
For instance, Menachem says ->
“If you’re starting out with Performance Max on a newer account where Google Ads doesn’t have much conversion data, it’s better to start with ‘Maximize conversions’ without Target ROAS setting. Once you generate a good number of conversions, Google gathers data about your campaign. Then you can switch to ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ with a Target ROAS setting.”
“On the other hand, if your account has already been steady for a while with standard shopping, you could go ahead with Target ROAS which is on par with what you’re seeing on your other campaigns and hoping to see in the future. And you can segment those campaigns based on margins and business goals like mentioned above.”
“But if your client sells, say a replenishable or a consumable product with a focus around customer acquisition cost, you can go with ‘Maximize conversions’ with a target CPA. And if their focus is around return on ad spend (ROAS), you can migrate from ‘maximize conversions’ to ‘maximize conversion value’ and input a ROAS target when the system has a bit more data.”
During this conversation, Mike Ryan made some interesting points on Target ROAS ->
Tips to revive low-impression products.
Sometimes, in automated bidding, you get into situations where certain products just don’t have a lot of volume. As a result, Google may get into a self-reinforcing loop where it doesn’t know the conversion rate and hence stops testing such products. These might be products you wanted to prioritize and get out of your warehouse.
Here are some tips to revive such products and get more impressions.
Make your data feed more descriptive.
Improve your data feed by making it very descriptive. Use the right keywords based on the product so that it can enter more auctions.
Build data by breaking such products into specific campaigns.
If you have a product in a campaign that’s not getting enough traffic, break it into its own campaign maybe with a ‘Maximize conversions’ strategy.
Put such products into Standard Shopping first and then move them to Performance Max.
Standard shopping campaigns offer you more control. So try putting those products into standard shopping, build up the history behind that product ID, and then put them back into Performance Max.
Menachem also shared a few more tips to help you get the best out of your Performance Max campaigns using landing page data ->
He wrote in detail about maximizing performance from your Performance Max campaigns on his blog.
Tips to get around common concerns in Performance Max.
While Google does allow you to block keywords, you cannot add negative keywords at the account level as of April 2023. Google says it will soon be available to all users. For now, you need to get in touch with a Google representative to add negative keywords to your Performance Max campaigns.
Excluding audiences from your campaigns.
To exclude certain audiences, upload your customer list and exclude your existing customers or people who unsubscribed from your email list.
Performance Max is here to stay.
Google is regularly adding new features and components to Performance Max. We could soon see improved geographic targeting, better exclusions, and auction insights, just to name a few. So it’s clear that this is the strategy Google is committed to.
“At the end of the day, technology is always moving forward, if you don’t move
with it, you’ll get left behind.”
— Menachem Ani
And, the practitioners say we should get on board with it, and take advantage of the new features to make sure we’re set up for success in the future for our clients.
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This article was originally written on Jul 21, 2022. It has been updated on April 6, 2023.
A lot has been written and said about Performance Max, so we have made sure that we don’t make this another blog post about the same pointers.
Then, what is this about? This blog post is about managing and optimizing your Performance Max campaigns using Optmyzr.
If you want to learn how to safeguard your Performance Max campaigns,read this post.
Let’s start with the most important and talked-about concept in Performance Max: audience signals.
Audience Signals for Performance Max asset groups
What is an audience signal in Performance Max?
An audience signal is how you tell Performance Max who’s most likely to convert. The signal can include your data or custom segments.
Performance Max campaigns can show ads to audiences other than your signals. However, this is still optional, but a useful way to guide machine learning models to optimize your campaign.
There are multiple ways to add audience signals:
Custom segments - people based on their search and website interests or app downloads
Your data - people based on your customer list, who have interacted with your site
Interests - people based on their market interests, life events, or their affinity
Demographics - people belonging to specific age and gender groups
Google says, “To enhance machine learning, use search term-based custom segments”. So, let’s look at that first. As described, custom segments are based on what people search for, and to use this in the audience signal, you can add the search terms that you think your audience will look out for on Google.
Add custom segments to asset groups
You can get ideas to identify the best-performing search terms and keywords in your account using Rule Engine and add them to your asset groups as custom segments.
Or you can use a new Express optimization, ‘Asset groups with no Audience Signal’ to find the asset groups without any audience signal and add recommended search terms that your ideal customers are looking for, or add keywords describing your customer’s interests.
Another way to manage audience signals is to add your data (previously known as remarketing lists - the list of people who have shown interest in your product earlier).
Add your data to asset groups
You can create Customer list segments using Import Customer Lists feature in Optmyzr.
It lets you create a new customer list and update it regularly based on your spreadsheet data.
You can read about the feature in more detail here.
You will find these customer lists available in Google Ads to be linked to asset groups. You can link the relevant customer list to each asset group and then updating it with fresh data is something Optmyzr can take care of.
When it comes to managing Performance Max campaigns, audience signals can be one of the most important ways, but they are not the only ones. There are other gears too that can be used to analyze and optimize your campaigns as you’ll find out by reading further.
View, analyze, and report on the performance of Performance Max campaigns
You can view and analyze the performance of your campaigns on the Account Dashboard, in Rule Engine, and in audits.
Classify Performance Max campaign performance by channels
You can use the new widget on the Account Dashboard to classify the performance of all the Performance Max campaigns in the account across 4 different channels: Shopping, Display, Video, and Other (which includes Search, Gmail, Discovery, Maps).
You can also further drill down to see this performance classification for each campaign. It is called the Performance Max Channel Distribution widget.
Audit the structure of Performance Max campaigns
Performance Max campaigns are dependent on assets for their performance, so missing out on them is not advisable. You can use Optmyzr audits to find any missing components from your Performance Max campaigns.
For example, you can find the campaigns with Final URL Expansion turned OFF and then choose to turn the URL Expansion ON in Google Ads if you’d like Google to replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query and generate assets dynamically to match the landing page.
Stay on top of Performance Max campaigns’ performance using alerts
Being the black box Performance Max is, often the performance changes overnight and it would make sense to stay on top of these changes. You can track metrics like Impressions, clicks, conversions, or your own custom metrics using alerts in Optmyzr.
For example, if you set up an alert for Performance Max campaigns, the system is going to look at the average performance of your campaigns in an account and alert you if something goes wrong.
You can then further analyze if this change is because earlier you were receiving huge traffic from the Shopping channel and now you are not, or if there are some new competitors in the market that are causing you a loss in revenue.
You can also check the top competitors for your account in Optmyzr on the Account Dashboard.
Check broken URLs for Performance Max asset groups with the URL checker.
The URL checker helps in checking broken URLs for asset groups and sitelinks used in Performance Max . You can choose to pause the asset groups with a text like “product not found” or “out of stock” and get notified about the same to ensure better user experience on your website.
Adjust bids for different parts of the day with the Hour of the Week Bidder.
The Hour of the Week Bidder helps you make bid adjustments for different parts of the day and decide when to show your ads. Performance Max campaigns do not support bid adjustments, however, this tool can help in setting up the ad scheduling for your campaigns and gives you the flexibility to show your ads on a particular day and time of the week.
Exclude placements and locations that are expensive for the account
Performance Max doesn’t give you a lot of control to target the right keywords or have the right bid adjustment, but it does let you play with certain levers to define the scope of your advertisement.
Exclude low-performing placements for Performance Max campaigns
You can reduce costs and make sure only the right kind of traffic reaches your campaigns by excluding the placements that are not performing well for you.
You can do it as a quick optimization using Account level placement exclusion. This will find mobile apps, YouTube videos & channels, and websites with no conversions and exclude them from the account.
If you’d like to automate this optimization to check once every month and exclude the placements to reduce wastage spend, you can use the Rule Engine.
Exclude expensive locations from the campaign
You can choose to exclude cities, zip codes, or regions that are accruing costs but are not converting for your Performance Max campaigns.
The Rule Engine in Optmyzr can help you identify expensive locations for Performance Max campaigns and exclude them based on your own rules.
Manage budgets for Performance Max campaigns
Monitor Performance Max budgets
To make sure your Performance Max campaigns don’t overspend, you can create a Multi-account budget alert that allows you to group together all the budgets you’d like to track together and assign a spend cap for them.
When the target monthly budget is spent, you can choose to get a notification or even have the associated campaigns paused. At the beginning of the new budget cycle, the paused campaigns will get automatically re-enabled again.
Analyze Performance Max budgets
Use the Spend Projection to view daily and monthly spend patterns and to predict how much your Performance Max campaigns are likely to spend by the end of the budget cycle. By inserting your target budget, you’ll also see how much under or over the target the campaigns are likely to spend.
You can also analyze the Performance Max budget performance using the Optimize Budgets (Single Platform) and Optimize Budgets Across Platforms.
See how many conversions, clicks, and impressions are associated with a budget.
Compare your current daily budget to the average daily spend to understand if your Performance Max campaign is spending the budget you’ve allocated for it. If the Average daily spend is well below the daily budget, you can try to troubleshoot non-budget-related delivery issues (in elements like assets or audience signals). On the other hand, you can consider reallocating budgets from other, underspending campaigns to a Performance Max campaign that constantly exhausts its daily budget.
With Optimize Budgets Across Platforms, you can even allocate budgets from underperforming campaigns running on other platforms like Meta or Microsoft Advertising.
Manage budget for Performance Max campaigns with automation
If you have set rules or settings to manage the budgets, you can automate this process in Optmyzr.
You can choose to pause Performance Max campaigns when the campaign target budget is reached and re-enable them in the next month using the Flexible budgets script. Read more about this script here.
You can also use Reach Target monthly budget script to reallocate budgets in order to spend the mentioned target budget. Read more about this script here.
By using if-then-else statements, you can build conditional sequences varying from simple rule-based budget reports to more sophisticated workflows. For example, you can choose to modify your daily budget if your average daily spend is less than the daily budget. Or, you can plug in your own breakeven ROAS data using a spreadsheet integration and modify budgets at different aggressiveness levels, based on how close to the breakeven ROAS your campaigns are. This can be done in the Rule Engine.
Read here for more information on Performance Max for scripts.
And if you want to start optimizing your Performance Max campaigns right away, take a 14-day free trial now.
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It’s hard to put into words just how much of a shift Performance Max campaigns represent for the search-first advertiser. Google Ads used to be text first (both in SEO and PPC) and strategies and budgets that served that era have struggled to remain viable.
Performance Max allows advertisers to cover the entire Google ad network (search, display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, local) with a single campaign containing text and visual creative, audience signals to guide the learning period, and conversion action focus.
One of the big shifts Performance Max introduced is investing a single budget that would look at all stages of the funnel (regardless of whether the advertiser intended to invest in those stages). These stages include visual creatives like display and video. This meant that if the creative for a video or display wasn’t there, Google would automatically create some based on existing assets.
Performance Max for the most part is a successful innovation with fairly positive sentiment among those who try it.
However, there were always a few areas that even the most ardent Performance Max supporters found wanting.
4 common advertiser concerns in Performance Max
Performance Max did not let you apply negatives directly to the campaign (particularly branded terms). This caused a lot of suspicion around the positive metrics because it seemed like Performance Max was taking credit for branded work as non-branded.
There’s also the “ugly” automatically created ads when an advertiser didn’t have assets to supply their own.
And a lot of advertisers fear Performance Max cannibalizing their existing campaigns. This would prove to be unfounded, but it was a valid concern given the black-box nature of Performance Max.
The campaign also forces spending on networks your brand may not value as highly (if at all).
Google introduces updates to Performance Max
On February 23, 2023, Google announced some major changes/updates to Performance Max, as well as affirming some elements that would remain.
Campaign-level brand exclusions
Campaign-level negatives are coming, providing an added layer of protection and enabling PMax campaigns to cohabit with siloed campaigns.
This is huge because one of the operational concerns some advertisers had was the account-level negatives getting in the way of blocking intended branded traffic.
Feed targeting (i.e. Dynamic Search Ads or DSA) functionality is coming to PMax
This will allow for more focused control of which parts of the business get access to the budget.
Performance Max has been a no-brainer for eCommerce (mostly due to it replacing smart shopping). Feed-based targeting for non-ecommerce is huge for those who benefit from DSA, but also sparks speculation on whether DSA as a stand-alone campaign type will be retired.
Ability to turn off automatically-created creative
YouTube shorts will still be a viable placement.
More control over brand placements
The content suitability center allows for more control over which types of placements your brand will serve on Display and YouTube.
Additional reporting available at the asset group level, along with budget pacing
Being able to see traditional Google Ads metrics will help translate performance in a more apples-to-apples way, as well as know when to lean in against reallocating budgets.
These changes to Performance Max are exciting. However, there are some underlying strategic items that must be accounted for.
Can your brand make YouTube work?
One of the big frustrations of Performance Max remains: brands must account for visual creative. Given how search has evolved this makes sense. Most markets prefer consuming video or visual assets over text.
However, if you don’t have the video creative, those placements will be an expensive waste. If you want the benefit of Performance Max with more control, you may want to consider search campaigns with display expansion.
Before reaching for the pitchforks, consider the following:
Image assets will enable your text ads to behave like display spots while ensuring the majority is still going to search campaigns.
No forced video spots (including YouTube shorts).
You’ll be able to get accurate network segmentation (yes, scripts exist but they don’t always work).
More control and visibility into what is happening in the campaign.
If you are able to provide video assets, there is no good reason not to leverage Performance Max.
According to Google, advertisers saw an 18% improvement in conversions over standard campaigns at a comparable cost per acquisition (CPAs).
Are you forcing audiences at the wrong time?
Unlike traditional campaigns, Performance Max has a set and limited time when adding audience signals. After the initial learning period, adding audience signals can actually hurt the campaign.
Adding audience signals at the beginning of a campaign helps jumpstart it. Once the campaign has exited the learning period, audience signals provide diminishing returns (and can potentially hurt your Performance Max campaign.
Making creative that’s better than auto-generated content
There is no denying a human focused on creating ads that match the ideal audience will outperform a machine. However, not every brand has access to creative-first marketers.
PPC requires both creative and analytical skills that are rare to find in a single person or team.
Auto-generated content is for those who don’t have the bandwidth or resources to create video, image, and text ads. Given that these assets are pulled from your existing resources (website, ads, etc.), “ugly” ads are a good sign you should be auditing all the creative your brand is serving.
Turning off auto-generated content will make sense for the vast majority of advertisers. It’s just important to own that human nature and history shows folks tend not to put in the effort. So if you can, you’ll be able to come out ahead.
A big part of this is ensuring the placements match your brand. Optmyzr customers can use the Smart Placement tool to ensure their creatives aren’t getting lost on sub-par placements.
Final Thoughts
Performance Max is a powerful ad campaign and does a lot of good for brands who adopt it. Yes, there are still areas the campaign type can improve, but it’s gratifying to know Google is listening to advertiser feedback.
It’s no secret that Performance Max campaigns present limitations in terms of data and insights we can pull from them. As a result, understanding the causes of their performance fluctuations can be difficult.
I’ve created an in-depth 44-point checklist for ecommerce businesses in this article to make accomplishing that task easier for you.
Of course, you don’t need to go through every single one of these points. Just go over the ones that are relevant to your business.
I also discussed some of these points on PPC Town Hall with Frederick Vallaeys and Mike Rhodes. You can watch the full video here:
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Performance Max 44-point evaluation checklist for ecommerce businesses
Investigate…
Estimated conversion reporting delay.
Average days to conversion from first ad interaction (account-wide and campaign-specific).
Conversion tracking and recent changes to conversion actions.
What “normal” PMax performance fluctuation looks like for the account (if appl.)
Recent changes to budget, bid strategy type, Asset Groups, and Listing Groups
Google Merchant Center product disapprovals and warnings, account issues, and feed issues.
Changes to the site (e.g. navigation/checkout, plugins, hosting, page designs)
Changes to in-stock products, especially best sellers.
Changes to pricing, customer shipping costs, and promotions listed or previously listed on the site.
Extremely negative reviews on and off the site
Google Search Console for “Failing” URLs
Changes in relevant search and buying behavior via the Insights section of your PMax campaign and your account as a whole, Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, your site’s search feature (if appl.), Best Sellers section of Google Merchant Center (if appl.), and Microsoft Ads (if appl.).
New competitors in the market or competitors who are changing their level of competitiveness within ad auctions you compete in.
Major changes in other marketing and site traffic channels outside of Google and Microsoft Ads (e.g. Facebook Ads, email automation, affiliates, third-party remarketing channels)
Major changes in on-site shopping behavior (e.g. cart abandonment, check-out abandonment, sessions with transactions)
Shifts in Shopping network-specific performance for PMax.
Top Bidding Signals report for optimization changes recently made by automated bidding.
Performance shifts of landing pages PMax ad clicks are being sent to.
Major changes made to non-PMax campaigns that may have impacted the performance of PMax.
Major shifts in the performance of high-volume or high-performing search terms, geographies, devices, days, days of the week, hours, audiences, match types, or campaign types in non-PMax campaigns.
Performance metric outliers for the campaign pre and post-major increases or decreases in performance.
Performance metric outliers for the products advertised in the campaign - at the campaign-level and Asset Group-level.
Performance metric outliers for the Listing Groups in the campaign.
Asset Group assets or Ad Extensions with Eligible (Limited) or Disapproved status.
Seasonality Adjustments not being added for major promotions, or for other major expected spikes or dips in conversion rates.
Improperly added Data Exclusions, or for instances where Data Exclusions should have been added but were not.
Scripts or Automated Rules that made changes to the account that may have had an impact on Performance Max.
Account changes by other users who are not the primary account manager.
Auto-applied recommendation changes made by Google.
Customer match list additions, removals, or edits.
Custom Experiments recently ended in the account.
Value rules or conversion value adjustments were added, edited, or removed.
“Best” rated assets inside top performing Asset Groups had a recent change in rating.
High-performing or high-volume search categories or terms shifted away from a high-performing or high-volume Asset Group.
Edits made to a Business Feed or Custom Variable that affected any non-PMax campaigns.
CRM integration issues.
Negative Keyword List was added to the PMax campaign being evaluated per the request of another user.
Negative keywords were improperly added to a Negative Keyword List that is applied to the PMax campaign being evaluated.
YouTube ads were opted out of by another user.
Mobile app placements not owned and operated by Google had major increases or decreases in impressions.
Mobile app category exclusions were applied at the account or campaign level.
Location or Ad Schedule exclusions were added or removed for the PMax campaign being evaluated.
Improperly setup Performance Max URL Exclusions.
Auto-generated YouTube videos were added by Google to the PMax campaign being evaluated.
Want to safeguard your Performance Max campaigns? Click here to learn how.
This is a guest post by Cory Lindholm, Founder of Ads By Cory.
About the author: Cory is a paid search expert in Google and Microsoft Ads. He has helped countless brands grow their businesses with advanced paid search strategies for nearly a decade.
The busiest shopping period of the year is just around the corner. And we’ve seen several consumer behavior changes this year as a result of the economic downturn and other macroeconomic factors which make this shopping season unlike any other.
So we need real data from someone who actually knows and understands what’s happening and provides us with suggestions to better prepare for this shopping season. And who better to learn all of that from than Google?
We’ve spoken to Willie Booker, Product Strategy Lead at Google on our latest PPC Town Hall to learn the trends and tips to set up our Performance Max campaigns for this holiday season. In the episode, we also spoke to Andrew Lolk, Founder of SavvyRevenue to get his perspective on that and also understand how agencies are preparing for the same.
Watch the full episode below.
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How consumer behavior has changed in 2022?
Consumers are shopping earlier than usual
Willie Booker says that 42% of consumers are shopping earlier in 2022 than they did in 2021. And in the U.K., 30% of consumers have already started their holiday shopping in June.
In fact, we’re only at the end of October and Target has already started its Black Friday sale.
**Source**: Target
Andrew Lolk, founder of SavvyRevenue has also seen a shift in consumer behavior. He says ->
“We’ve seen Black Friday become a big thing the last few years, and now it’s even bigger. A couple of years ago we only did Black Friday, and now two or three years later we’re doing “black months”. I personally like it. I think it puts less pressure on logistics this way. You can spread out bidding and budget a lot better, but it comes with some challenges if you get in behind later than everybody else.”
This shift in consumer behavior is not new. In the last two years, we’ve seen consumers shopping earlier than usual due to inventory and supply chain issues.
Most consumers are now brand-agnostic
Willie says that over 71% of consumers switched brands in the past year for reasons like better deals, better product quality, better customer service, etc.
Google’s also predicting an uptick in BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick-Up in Store) this year, as we saw in 2020 and 2021.
Embrace experimentation to take advantage of social commerce
Shopping has always been a social experience. That’s why before making a purchase, consumers look for trusted sources.
And it’s very clear from Google’s survey chart above. Consumers look for social proof like product videos and reviews which influence their purchase decisions.
Google’s Performance Max tips for the 2022 holiday season
As you start to plan for the peak holiday season, have a look at these 6 tips that Google shared with us.
We’ve listed them down here on a high level. For more details on these tips, please watch the PPC Town Hall episode above.
1. Adjust bids and budgets
Google says this is the quickest way to start to see results from your campaigns.
2. Use seasonality adjustments
According to Google, seasonality adjustments are used to inform Smart Bidding of expected changes in conversion rates for future events like promotions or sales. Google recommends this for expert advertisers.
3. Enable final URL expansion
Final URL expansion is turned on by default in your campaign. Making sure that it’s on allows Google to replace your final URL with a more relevant landing page for the user based on their behavior.
4. Segment your holiday campaigns and optimize creatives accordingly
Google suggests you get your feed and creatives ready to clearly highlight products that are going to be featured for the relevant holiday.
5. Feature holiday products
Make sure that a holiday plan is in place and that you have the right bids, budgets, and products to be featured in your campaigns.
And if you want to prioritize certain types of products, create a separate Performance Max campaign for them.
6. Enable Enhanced conversions for more accurate conversion measurement
Google suggests using enhanced conversions to improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement and unlock more powerful bidding.
Timing is important
In terms of your holiday setup, Google recommends planning four to six weeks ahead of your peak period and making adjustments with at least two weeks of ramp-up time for each new campaign that you set up.
The ramp-up period also helps with allowing the smart bidding algorithm to bid on products that haven’t been bid high so far in your campaign.
Make sure to use this playbook this holiday season. However, you also need to provide your Performance Max campaign with good data and value-focused optimization so that Google clearly understands what it is that your business really wants and what a ’conversion’ means to you.
Performance Max campaigns are a new campaign type in Google Ads in which advertisers can create one campaign and get their ads wherever users are interacting with Google’s services, whether that’s on Search, Display, YouTube, Maps, Discover, or Gmail.
It promises to simplify advertising in a world where user behavior has become more fragmented. It’s an especially appealing promise for new advertisers who may have not known where to start with Google Ads.
But for existing advertisers, the introduction of yet another campaign type may be confusing. So here I’ll shed some light on how to think about Performance Max.
I also got a chance to speak to Google about it where they shared some best practices and even answered several FAQs from the PPC community. Here’s the full conversation:
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Is Performance Max Replacing Other Campaigns?
At the end of September 2022, Performance Max replaced Smart Shopping and Local campaigns. Other campaign types will continue to exist until further notice according to Google.
Where Do Performance Max Campaigns Run?
Performance Max provides the equivalent of running the following current Google Ads campaign types: Search, Display, Shopping, Video, Gmail, and Discovery. It can then place ads across Google’s vast number of pages and properties as shown below.
**Source**: Google
What Do the Experts Say About Running Performance Max Instead of Other Campaigns?
As of writing this blog post, Performance Max campaigns have been around for over a year. Many advertisers have tested the campaign type, ran experiments with it, and learned a lot in the process.
I got a chance to speak to Menachem Ani and Andrew Lolk, two experts and practitioners on PPC Town Hall 71 to understand what they’ve learned from running Performance Max campaigns for a full year.
They’ve covered a wide range of topics from structuring asset groups to attribution and negative keywords.
Watch the full conversation below.
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What Inputs Do I Have With Performance Max Campaigns?
When setting up a Performance Max campaign, Google will ask you to provide the following inputs to help their artificial intelligence get started with good ads:
Your marketing objectives and goals
Budget
Creative assets including text, images, and video (optional, since this will auto-generate)
Geo-targets
Optional Feeds such as Google My Business, Google Merchant Center, Dynamic Ads Feed, and Business Data Feeds
Optional Audience Signals such as First-Party Audiences (including Remarketing Lists) and Google Audiences (including Custom Audiences)
With that information, automation is off to the races and will try to show your ad where it expects it may lead to a conversion.
Latest updates to Performance Max (as of February 2023)
Google announced some major updates to Performance Max on February 23, 2023, to provide greater control, flexibility, and insights to advertisers.
Here is the list of updates:
Campaign-level brand exclusions
Page feeds to refine Search inventory results
Video creation tools
Additional reporting available at the asset group level, along with budget pacing
In this article, you’ll learn how to manage and optimize your Performance Max for Retail campaigns. You’ll discover some great Optmyzr tools and strategies to make the most of your advertising budget and achieve your marketing goals.
Let’s get started.
Manage account structure and keep it in sync with your feed
The first step in managing your Performance Max campaigns is creating a structure that works best for your business goals. Use the Shopping Campaign Builder and refresher to create a campaign structure that is in sync with your Merchant feed. This will ensure that your products are always up-to-date and your campaigns are optimized for performance.
You can also add assets like images and videos to your campaigns to make them more appealing to your audience.
View and analyze the performance of your products
Once you have set up your Performance Max campaigns, use the Shopping Analysis tool to analyze the performance of your products. This tool tells you which ROAS bracket your product belongs to, which helps you identify how your brand is performing.
You can also use Rule Engine to get alerted on how the performance of your products changes over time. This helps you optimize your campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
You can also use the Shopping Feed Audits to enhance your Performance Max campaigns. The audits will help in pinpointing problematic products, such as those priced higher than the market benchmark price or the ones that have been disapproved because of some quality violations.
For example, the tool can identify products lacking required attributes like ‘Brand’. Once you’ve identified the issues, you can resolve them in the Google Merchant Center.
The Performance Max Channel Distribution widget on the Account Dashboard allows you to visualize the performance of your campaigns based on channels. You can view the performance of all campaigns across four channels: Shopping, Display, Video, and Other (which comprises Search, Gmail, Discovery, and Maps).
Moreover, you can also view the performance classification for each campaign using this widget.
Optimize campaign targets for better performance
Your campaign goals will determine the targets you set for your Performance Max campaigns. If you want to increase your reach, you should decrease your target ROAS. This will allow your ads to reach a wider audience and increase your brand visibility.
On the other hand, if you want to generate more revenue, you should increase your target ROAS. This will help you reach your most valuable customers and generate more sales. This can be done automatically based on performance data using Rule Engine.
Manage campaign budget for better performance
Finally, it’s important to regularly analyze the performance of your listing groups and exclude those that are not performing well. This will ensure that your campaigns are optimized for performance and that your budget is being spent on the most valuable products.
By excluding underperforming listing groups, you can prevent them from dragging down the overall performance of your campaigns.
If you want to keep an eye on your Retail Performance Max campaign budgets and prevent overspending, you can set up a multi-account budget alert. This feature lets you group together the budgets you want to monitor and set a ‘spend cap’ for them.
Once the monthly budget target is reached, you can opt to receive a notification or pause the relevant campaigns. When the new budget cycle starts, the paused campaigns will resume automatically. This way, you can avoid overspending and ensure that your Performance Max campaigns stay within their allocated budgets.
Targets and exclusions to focus on what matters
Managing Performance Max campaigns requires you to regularly analyze and optimize them. Focus on optimizing placements and locations, adding custom segments to asset groups, and managing audience signals to achieve maximum performance.
To exclude low-performing placements, use the Account level placement exclusion feature to quickly exclude mobile apps, YouTube videos & channels, and websites with no conversions. You can also automate this optimization using the Rule Engine to exclude placements every month.
You can also exclude expensive locations, once again, with the Rule Engine to identify and exclude cities, zip codes, or regions that are accruing costs but not converting for your Performance Max campaigns.
Check broken URLs for Performance Max asset groups with the URL checker.
The URL checker helps in checking broken URLs for asset groups and sitelinks used in Performance Max . You can choose to pause the asset groups with a text like “product not found” or “out of stock” and get notified about the same to ensure better user experience on your website.
Adjust bids for different parts of the day with the Hour of the Week Bidder.
The Hour of the Week Bidder helps you make bid adjustments for different parts of the day and decide when to show your ads. Performance Max campaigns do not support bid adjustments, however, this tool can help in setting up the ad scheduling for your campaigns and gives you the flexibility to show your ads on a particular day and time of the week.
One more way to improve the performance of your campaigns
You can also use a new Express optimization, ‘Asset groups with no Audience Signal’ to find the asset groups without any audience signal and add recommended search terms that your ideal customers are looking for, or add keywords describing your customer’s interests.
Open the black box of Performance Max
Managing Performance Max for Retail campaigns requires a strategic approach and a commitment to analyzing and optimizing your campaigns. We hope that by following the tips outlined above, you can create campaigns that are optimized for performance and deliver the results you need to grow your business.
And if you want to start optimizing your Performance Max campaigns right away, take a 14-day free trial now.
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Since its launch, Performance Max — the one campaign to rule them all — has seen widespread adoption among advertisers from various verticals.
What is Performance Max anyway?
Performance Max is a new campaign type in Google Ads in which you create one campaign and Google promotes your ads wherever your users are interacting with its services — Search, Display, YouTube, Maps, Discover, or Gmail.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how advertisers in ecommerce and retail specifically should approach this campaign type to drive better results.
P.S. We also spoke to two of the best experts in ecommerce, Mike Ryan and Menachem Ani, on PPC Town Hall 59 on the same topic. You can watch the full episode below:
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Smart Shopping Campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max
Smart Shopping and Local campaigns have been automatically upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022.
How to structure your Performance Max campaign?
Your campaign structure should be aligned with your client’s goal.
If your client has a low SKU-volume store with maybe five or ten products, you may create one campaign with one or two asset groups. If they have a larger store with hundreds or thousands of products, you could split it out a bit more into separate themes for more control over what products are taking up the bulk of the ad spend.
Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce presented the following approach.
He says that if you’re new or are still testing Performance Max you can take a simpler approach to structure your campaign and move towards a more granular approach as you learn going forward.
If your objective is margins, Mike says you could try the following approach.
**Source**: Smarter Ecommerce
Tips for Performance Max bidding strategies.
The bidding strategy that you should use will depend on how much data Google’s systems have about your campaign.
For instance, Menachem says ->
“If you’re starting out with Performance Max on a newer account where Google Ads doesn’t have much conversion data, it’s better to start with ‘Maximize conversions’ without Target ROAS setting. Once you generate a good number of conversions, Google gathers data about your campaign. Then you can switch to ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ with a Target ROAS setting.”
“On the other hand, if your account has already been steady for a while with standard shopping, you could go ahead with Target ROAS which is on par with what you’re seeing on your other campaigns and hoping to see in the future. And you can segment those campaigns based on margins and business goals like mentioned above.”
“But if your client sells, say a replenishable or a consumable product with a focus around customer acquisition cost, you can go with ‘Maximize conversions’ with a target CPA. And if their focus is around return on ad spend (ROAS), you can migrate from ‘maximize conversions’ to ‘maximize conversion value’ and input a ROAS target when the system has a bit more data.”
During this conversation, Mike Ryan made some interesting points on Target ROAS ->
Tips to revive low-impression products.
Sometimes, in automated bidding, you get into situations where certain products just don’t have a lot of volume. As a result, Google may get into a self-reinforcing loop where it doesn’t know the conversion rate and hence stops testing such products. These might be products you wanted to prioritize and get out of your warehouse.
Here are some tips to revive such products and get more impressions.
Make your data feed more descriptive.
Improve your data feed by making it very descriptive. Use the right keywords based on the product so that it can enter more auctions.
Build data by breaking such products into specific campaigns.
If you have a product in a campaign that’s not getting enough traffic, break it into its own campaign maybe with a ‘Maximize conversions’ strategy.
Put such products into Standard Shopping first and then move them to Performance Max.
Standard shopping campaigns offer you more control. So try putting those products into standard shopping, build up the history behind that product ID, and then put them back into Performance Max.
Menachem also shared a few more tips to help you get the best out of your Performance Max campaigns using landing page data ->
He wrote in detail about maximizing performance from your Performance Max campaigns on his blog.
Tips to get around common concerns in Performance Max.
While Google does allow you to block keywords, you cannot add negative keywords at the account level as of April 2023. Google says it will soon be available to all users. For now, you need to get in touch with a Google representative to add negative keywords to your Performance Max campaigns.
Excluding audiences from your campaigns.
To exclude certain audiences, upload your customer list and exclude your existing customers or people who unsubscribed from your email list.
Performance Max is here to stay.
Google is regularly adding new features and components to Performance Max. We could soon see improved geographic targeting, better exclusions, and auction insights, just to name a few. So it’s clear that this is the strategy Google is committed to.
“At the end of the day, technology is always moving forward, if you don’t move
with it, you’ll get left behind.”
— Menachem Ani
And, the practitioners say we should get on board with it, and take advantage of the new features to make sure we’re set up for success in the future for our clients.
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This article was originally written on Jul 21, 2022. It has been updated on April 6, 2023.
A lot has been written and said about Performance Max, so we have made sure that we don’t make this another blog post about the same pointers.
Then, what is this about? This blog post is about managing and optimizing your Performance Max campaigns using Optmyzr.
If you want to learn how to safeguard your Performance Max campaigns,read this post.
Let’s start with the most important and talked-about concept in Performance Max: audience signals.
Audience Signals for Performance Max asset groups
What is an audience signal in Performance Max?
An audience signal is how you tell Performance Max who’s most likely to convert. The signal can include your data or custom segments.
Performance Max campaigns can show ads to audiences other than your signals. However, this is still optional, but a useful way to guide machine learning models to optimize your campaign.
There are multiple ways to add audience signals:
Custom segments - people based on their search and website interests or app downloads
Your data - people based on your customer list, who have interacted with your site
Interests - people based on their market interests, life events, or their affinity
Demographics - people belonging to specific age and gender groups
Google says, “To enhance machine learning, use search term-based custom segments”. So, let’s look at that first. As described, custom segments are based on what people search for, and to use this in the audience signal, you can add the search terms that you think your audience will look out for on Google.
Add custom segments to asset groups
You can get ideas to identify the best-performing search terms and keywords in your account using Rule Engine and add them to your asset groups as custom segments.
Or you can use a new Express optimization, ‘Asset groups with no Audience Signal’ to find the asset groups without any audience signal and add recommended search terms that your ideal customers are looking for, or add keywords describing your customer’s interests.
Another way to manage audience signals is to add your data (previously known as remarketing lists - the list of people who have shown interest in your product earlier).
Add your data to asset groups
You can create Customer list segments using Import Customer Lists feature in Optmyzr.
It lets you create a new customer list and update it regularly based on your spreadsheet data.
You can read about the feature in more detail here.
You will find these customer lists available in Google Ads to be linked to asset groups. You can link the relevant customer list to each asset group and then updating it with fresh data is something Optmyzr can take care of.
When it comes to managing Performance Max campaigns, audience signals can be one of the most important ways, but they are not the only ones. There are other gears too that can be used to analyze and optimize your campaigns as you’ll find out by reading further.
View, analyze, and report on the performance of Performance Max campaigns
You can view and analyze the performance of your campaigns on the Account Dashboard, in Rule Engine, and in audits.
Classify Performance Max campaign performance by channels
You can use the new widget on the Account Dashboard to classify the performance of all the Performance Max campaigns in the account across 4 different channels: Shopping, Display, Video, and Other (which includes Search, Gmail, Discovery, Maps).
You can also further drill down to see this performance classification for each campaign. It is called the Performance Max Channel Distribution widget.
Audit the structure of Performance Max campaigns
Performance Max campaigns are dependent on assets for their performance, so missing out on them is not advisable. You can use Optmyzr audits to find any missing components from your Performance Max campaigns.
For example, you can find the campaigns with Final URL Expansion turned OFF and then choose to turn the URL Expansion ON in Google Ads if you’d like Google to replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query and generate assets dynamically to match the landing page.
Stay on top of Performance Max campaigns’ performance using alerts
Being the black box Performance Max is, often the performance changes overnight and it would make sense to stay on top of these changes. You can track metrics like Impressions, clicks, conversions, or your own custom metrics using alerts in Optmyzr.
For example, if you set up an alert for Performance Max campaigns, the system is going to look at the average performance of your campaigns in an account and alert you if something goes wrong.
You can then further analyze if this change is because earlier you were receiving huge traffic from the Shopping channel and now you are not, or if there are some new competitors in the market that are causing you a loss in revenue.
You can also check the top competitors for your account in Optmyzr on the Account Dashboard.
Check broken URLs for Performance Max asset groups with the URL checker.
The URL checker helps in checking broken URLs for asset groups and sitelinks used in Performance Max . You can choose to pause the asset groups with a text like “product not found” or “out of stock” and get notified about the same to ensure better user experience on your website.
Adjust bids for different parts of the day with the Hour of the Week Bidder.
The Hour of the Week Bidder helps you make bid adjustments for different parts of the day and decide when to show your ads. Performance Max campaigns do not support bid adjustments, however, this tool can help in setting up the ad scheduling for your campaigns and gives you the flexibility to show your ads on a particular day and time of the week.
Exclude placements and locations that are expensive for the account
Performance Max doesn’t give you a lot of control to target the right keywords or have the right bid adjustment, but it does let you play with certain levers to define the scope of your advertisement.
Exclude low-performing placements for Performance Max campaigns
You can reduce costs and make sure only the right kind of traffic reaches your campaigns by excluding the placements that are not performing well for you.
You can do it as a quick optimization using Account level placement exclusion. This will find mobile apps, YouTube videos & channels, and websites with no conversions and exclude them from the account.
If you’d like to automate this optimization to check once every month and exclude the placements to reduce wastage spend, you can use the Rule Engine.
Exclude expensive locations from the campaign
You can choose to exclude cities, zip codes, or regions that are accruing costs but are not converting for your Performance Max campaigns.
The Rule Engine in Optmyzr can help you identify expensive locations for Performance Max campaigns and exclude them based on your own rules.
Manage budgets for Performance Max campaigns
Monitor Performance Max budgets
To make sure your Performance Max campaigns don’t overspend, you can create a Multi-account budget alert that allows you to group together all the budgets you’d like to track together and assign a spend cap for them.
When the target monthly budget is spent, you can choose to get a notification or even have the associated campaigns paused. At the beginning of the new budget cycle, the paused campaigns will get automatically re-enabled again.
Analyze Performance Max budgets
Use the Spend Projection to view daily and monthly spend patterns and to predict how much your Performance Max campaigns are likely to spend by the end of the budget cycle. By inserting your target budget, you’ll also see how much under or over the target the campaigns are likely to spend.
You can also analyze the Performance Max budget performance using the Optimize Budgets (Single Platform) and Optimize Budgets Across Platforms.
See how many conversions, clicks, and impressions are associated with a budget.
Compare your current daily budget to the average daily spend to understand if your Performance Max campaign is spending the budget you’ve allocated for it. If the Average daily spend is well below the daily budget, you can try to troubleshoot non-budget-related delivery issues (in elements like assets or audience signals). On the other hand, you can consider reallocating budgets from other, underspending campaigns to a Performance Max campaign that constantly exhausts its daily budget.
With Optimize Budgets Across Platforms, you can even allocate budgets from underperforming campaigns running on other platforms like Meta or Microsoft Advertising.
Manage budget for Performance Max campaigns with automation
If you have set rules or settings to manage the budgets, you can automate this process in Optmyzr.
You can choose to pause Performance Max campaigns when the campaign target budget is reached and re-enable them in the next month using the Flexible budgets script. Read more about this script here.
You can also use Reach Target monthly budget script to reallocate budgets in order to spend the mentioned target budget. Read more about this script here.
By using if-then-else statements, you can build conditional sequences varying from simple rule-based budget reports to more sophisticated workflows. For example, you can choose to modify your daily budget if your average daily spend is less than the daily budget. Or, you can plug in your own breakeven ROAS data using a spreadsheet integration and modify budgets at different aggressiveness levels, based on how close to the breakeven ROAS your campaigns are. This can be done in the Rule Engine.
Read here for more information on Performance Max for scripts.
And if you want to start optimizing your Performance Max campaigns right away, take a 14-day free trial now.
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It’s hard to put into words just how much of a shift Performance Max campaigns represent for the search-first advertiser. Google Ads used to be text first (both in SEO and PPC) and strategies and budgets that served that era have struggled to remain viable.
Performance Max allows advertisers to cover the entire Google ad network (search, display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, local) with a single campaign containing text and visual creative, audience signals to guide the learning period, and conversion action focus.
One of the big shifts Performance Max introduced is investing a single budget that would look at all stages of the funnel (regardless of whether the advertiser intended to invest in those stages). These stages include visual creatives like display and video. This meant that if the creative for a video or display wasn’t there, Google would automatically create some based on existing assets.
Performance Max for the most part is a successful innovation with fairly positive sentiment among those who try it.
However, there were always a few areas that even the most ardent Performance Max supporters found wanting.
4 common advertiser concerns in Performance Max
Performance Max did not let you apply negatives directly to the campaign (particularly branded terms). This caused a lot of suspicion around the positive metrics because it seemed like Performance Max was taking credit for branded work as non-branded.
There’s also the “ugly” automatically created ads when an advertiser didn’t have assets to supply their own.
And a lot of advertisers fear Performance Max cannibalizing their existing campaigns. This would prove to be unfounded, but it was a valid concern given the black-box nature of Performance Max.
The campaign also forces spending on networks your brand may not value as highly (if at all).
Google introduces updates to Performance Max
On February 23, 2023, Google announced some major changes/updates to Performance Max, as well as affirming some elements that would remain.
Campaign-level brand exclusions
Campaign-level negatives are coming, providing an added layer of protection and enabling PMax campaigns to cohabit with siloed campaigns.
This is huge because one of the operational concerns some advertisers had was the account-level negatives getting in the way of blocking intended branded traffic.
Feed targeting (i.e. Dynamic Search Ads or DSA) functionality is coming to PMax
This will allow for more focused control of which parts of the business get access to the budget.
Performance Max has been a no-brainer for eCommerce (mostly due to it replacing smart shopping). Feed-based targeting for non-ecommerce is huge for those who benefit from DSA, but also sparks speculation on whether DSA as a stand-alone campaign type will be retired.
Ability to turn off automatically-created creative
YouTube shorts will still be a viable placement.
More control over brand placements
The content suitability center allows for more control over which types of placements your brand will serve on Display and YouTube.
Additional reporting available at the asset group level, along with budget pacing
Being able to see traditional Google Ads metrics will help translate performance in a more apples-to-apples way, as well as know when to lean in against reallocating budgets.
These changes to Performance Max are exciting. However, there are some underlying strategic items that must be accounted for.
Can your brand make YouTube work?
One of the big frustrations of Performance Max remains: brands must account for visual creative. Given how search has evolved this makes sense. Most markets prefer consuming video or visual assets over text.
However, if you don’t have the video creative, those placements will be an expensive waste. If you want the benefit of Performance Max with more control, you may want to consider search campaigns with display expansion.
Before reaching for the pitchforks, consider the following:
Image assets will enable your text ads to behave like display spots while ensuring the majority is still going to search campaigns.
No forced video spots (including YouTube shorts).
You’ll be able to get accurate network segmentation (yes, scripts exist but they don’t always work).
More control and visibility into what is happening in the campaign.
If you are able to provide video assets, there is no good reason not to leverage Performance Max.
According to Google, advertisers saw an 18% improvement in conversions over standard campaigns at a comparable cost per acquisition (CPAs).
Are you forcing audiences at the wrong time?
Unlike traditional campaigns, Performance Max has a set and limited time when adding audience signals. After the initial learning period, adding audience signals can actually hurt the campaign.
Adding audience signals at the beginning of a campaign helps jumpstart it. Once the campaign has exited the learning period, audience signals provide diminishing returns (and can potentially hurt your Performance Max campaign.
Making creative that’s better than auto-generated content
There is no denying a human focused on creating ads that match the ideal audience will outperform a machine. However, not every brand has access to creative-first marketers.
PPC requires both creative and analytical skills that are rare to find in a single person or team.
Auto-generated content is for those who don’t have the bandwidth or resources to create video, image, and text ads. Given that these assets are pulled from your existing resources (website, ads, etc.), “ugly” ads are a good sign you should be auditing all the creative your brand is serving.
Turning off auto-generated content will make sense for the vast majority of advertisers. It’s just important to own that human nature and history shows folks tend not to put in the effort. So if you can, you’ll be able to come out ahead.
A big part of this is ensuring the placements match your brand. Optmyzr customers can use the Smart Placement tool to ensure their creatives aren’t getting lost on sub-par placements.
Final Thoughts
Performance Max is a powerful ad campaign and does a lot of good for brands who adopt it. Yes, there are still areas the campaign type can improve, but it’s gratifying to know Google is listening to advertiser feedback.
It’s no secret that Performance Max campaigns present limitations in terms of data and insights we can pull from them. As a result, understanding the causes of their performance fluctuations can be difficult.
I’ve created an in-depth 44-point checklist for ecommerce businesses in this article to make accomplishing that task easier for you.
Of course, you don’t need to go through every single one of these points. Just go over the ones that are relevant to your business.
I also discussed some of these points on PPC Town Hall with Frederick Vallaeys and Mike Rhodes. You can watch the full video here:
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Performance Max 44-point evaluation checklist for ecommerce businesses
Investigate…
Estimated conversion reporting delay.
Average days to conversion from first ad interaction (account-wide and campaign-specific).
Conversion tracking and recent changes to conversion actions.
What “normal” PMax performance fluctuation looks like for the account (if appl.)
Recent changes to budget, bid strategy type, Asset Groups, and Listing Groups
Google Merchant Center product disapprovals and warnings, account issues, and feed issues.
Changes to the site (e.g. navigation/checkout, plugins, hosting, page designs)
Changes to in-stock products, especially best sellers.
Changes to pricing, customer shipping costs, and promotions listed or previously listed on the site.
Extremely negative reviews on and off the site
Google Search Console for “Failing” URLs
Changes in relevant search and buying behavior via the Insights section of your PMax campaign and your account as a whole, Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, your site’s search feature (if appl.), Best Sellers section of Google Merchant Center (if appl.), and Microsoft Ads (if appl.).
New competitors in the market or competitors who are changing their level of competitiveness within ad auctions you compete in.
Major changes in other marketing and site traffic channels outside of Google and Microsoft Ads (e.g. Facebook Ads, email automation, affiliates, third-party remarketing channels)
Major changes in on-site shopping behavior (e.g. cart abandonment, check-out abandonment, sessions with transactions)
Shifts in Shopping network-specific performance for PMax.
Top Bidding Signals report for optimization changes recently made by automated bidding.
Performance shifts of landing pages PMax ad clicks are being sent to.
Major changes made to non-PMax campaigns that may have impacted the performance of PMax.
Major shifts in the performance of high-volume or high-performing search terms, geographies, devices, days, days of the week, hours, audiences, match types, or campaign types in non-PMax campaigns.
Performance metric outliers for the campaign pre and post-major increases or decreases in performance.
Performance metric outliers for the products advertised in the campaign - at the campaign-level and Asset Group-level.
Performance metric outliers for the Listing Groups in the campaign.
Asset Group assets or Ad Extensions with Eligible (Limited) or Disapproved status.
Seasonality Adjustments not being added for major promotions, or for other major expected spikes or dips in conversion rates.
Improperly added Data Exclusions, or for instances where Data Exclusions should have been added but were not.
Scripts or Automated Rules that made changes to the account that may have had an impact on Performance Max.
Account changes by other users who are not the primary account manager.
Auto-applied recommendation changes made by Google.
Customer match list additions, removals, or edits.
Custom Experiments recently ended in the account.
Value rules or conversion value adjustments were added, edited, or removed.
“Best” rated assets inside top performing Asset Groups had a recent change in rating.
High-performing or high-volume search categories or terms shifted away from a high-performing or high-volume Asset Group.
Edits made to a Business Feed or Custom Variable that affected any non-PMax campaigns.
CRM integration issues.
Negative Keyword List was added to the PMax campaign being evaluated per the request of another user.
Negative keywords were improperly added to a Negative Keyword List that is applied to the PMax campaign being evaluated.
YouTube ads were opted out of by another user.
Mobile app placements not owned and operated by Google had major increases or decreases in impressions.
Mobile app category exclusions were applied at the account or campaign level.
Location or Ad Schedule exclusions were added or removed for the PMax campaign being evaluated.
Improperly setup Performance Max URL Exclusions.
Auto-generated YouTube videos were added by Google to the PMax campaign being evaluated.
Want to safeguard your Performance Max campaigns? Click here to learn how.
This is a guest post by Cory Lindholm, Founder of Ads By Cory.
About the author: Cory is a paid search expert in Google and Microsoft Ads. He has helped countless brands grow their businesses with advanced paid search strategies for nearly a decade.
The busiest shopping period of the year is just around the corner. And we’ve seen several consumer behavior changes this year as a result of the economic downturn and other macroeconomic factors which make this shopping season unlike any other.
So we need real data from someone who actually knows and understands what’s happening and provides us with suggestions to better prepare for this shopping season. And who better to learn all of that from than Google?
We’ve spoken to Willie Booker, Product Strategy Lead at Google on our latest PPC Town Hall to learn the trends and tips to set up our Performance Max campaigns for this holiday season. In the episode, we also spoke to Andrew Lolk, Founder of SavvyRevenue to get his perspective on that and also understand how agencies are preparing for the same.
Watch the full episode below.
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts twice a month.
How consumer behavior has changed in 2022?
Consumers are shopping earlier than usual
Willie Booker says that 42% of consumers are shopping earlier in 2022 than they did in 2021. And in the U.K., 30% of consumers have already started their holiday shopping in June.
In fact, we’re only at the end of October and Target has already started its Black Friday sale.
**Source**: Target
Andrew Lolk, founder of SavvyRevenue has also seen a shift in consumer behavior. He says ->
“We’ve seen Black Friday become a big thing the last few years, and now it’s even bigger. A couple of years ago we only did Black Friday, and now two or three years later we’re doing “black months”. I personally like it. I think it puts less pressure on logistics this way. You can spread out bidding and budget a lot better, but it comes with some challenges if you get in behind later than everybody else.”
This shift in consumer behavior is not new. In the last two years, we’ve seen consumers shopping earlier than usual due to inventory and supply chain issues.
Most consumers are now brand-agnostic
Willie says that over 71% of consumers switched brands in the past year for reasons like better deals, better product quality, better customer service, etc.
Google’s also predicting an uptick in BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick-Up in Store) this year, as we saw in 2020 and 2021.
Embrace experimentation to take advantage of social commerce
Shopping has always been a social experience. That’s why before making a purchase, consumers look for trusted sources.
And it’s very clear from Google’s survey chart above. Consumers look for social proof like product videos and reviews which influence their purchase decisions.
Google’s Performance Max tips for the 2022 holiday season
As you start to plan for the peak holiday season, have a look at these 6 tips that Google shared with us.
We’ve listed them down here on a high level. For more details on these tips, please watch the PPC Town Hall episode above.
1. Adjust bids and budgets
Google says this is the quickest way to start to see results from your campaigns.
2. Use seasonality adjustments
According to Google, seasonality adjustments are used to inform Smart Bidding of expected changes in conversion rates for future events like promotions or sales. Google recommends this for expert advertisers.
3. Enable final URL expansion
Final URL expansion is turned on by default in your campaign. Making sure that it’s on allows Google to replace your final URL with a more relevant landing page for the user based on their behavior.
4. Segment your holiday campaigns and optimize creatives accordingly
Google suggests you get your feed and creatives ready to clearly highlight products that are going to be featured for the relevant holiday.
5. Feature holiday products
Make sure that a holiday plan is in place and that you have the right bids, budgets, and products to be featured in your campaigns.
And if you want to prioritize certain types of products, create a separate Performance Max campaign for them.
6. Enable Enhanced conversions for more accurate conversion measurement
Google suggests using enhanced conversions to improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement and unlock more powerful bidding.
Timing is important
In terms of your holiday setup, Google recommends planning four to six weeks ahead of your peak period and making adjustments with at least two weeks of ramp-up time for each new campaign that you set up.
The ramp-up period also helps with allowing the smart bidding algorithm to bid on products that haven’t been bid high so far in your campaign.
Make sure to use this playbook this holiday season. However, you also need to provide your Performance Max campaign with good data and value-focused optimization so that Google clearly understands what it is that your business really wants and what a ’conversion’ means to you.
