Performance Max Campaigns: How It Works, Best Practices, Answers to FAQs & More

Episode Description

#PerformanceMaxCampaigns is the latest #GoogleAds campaign type that helps you find customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign.

Since it’s still early days, there is so much to learn about it. That’s why we brought in experts from Google — Sagar Shah and Rodney Ip — two of the people behind this new campaign type.

Sagar and Rodney share everything about Performance Max campaigns, the best practices to follow, and the future roadmap. They also answered several frequently asked questions by the PPC community about Performance Max campaigns.

You will learn:

• What are Performance Max Campaigns, the benefits, and future roadmap
• Best practices to follow, and
• Answers to several common questions

Episode Takeaways

Understanding Performance Max Campaigns:

• Performance Max is an automated campaign type that operates across various Google Ads channels like search, display, and YouTube using machine learning to optimize for conversions.
• It aims to simplify campaign management while maximizing conversion value by leveraging the full breadth of Google’s inventory and advanced machine learning technologies.

Benefits and Future Roadmap:

• Performance Max campaigns are designed to improve conversion rates by intelligently distributing ads across all Google platforms.
• Future updates may include enhanced controls for advertisers, more detailed performance insights, and expanded capabilities for targeting and optimizing for new customers.

Best Practices:

• Clearly define your conversion goals and ensure they are aligned with your business objectives.
• Utilize audience signals to guide the machine learning models, helping to speed up the campaign’s learning phase and improve performance.
• Continuously update and optimize creative assets and ensure robust first-party data integration to enhance campaign effectiveness.

Addressing Common Questions:

• While Performance Max does not currently allow advertisers to choose specific channels or make bid adjustments per channel, it optimizes campaign performance across all channels based on set goals.
• For businesses concerned about brand safety or campaign cannibalization, Google is considering features like account-level negative keywords and further enhancements to protect brand terms.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC town hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co-founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So we try to keep these sessions super relevant. And these days, I think there’s almost no more relevant and burning topic than Performance Max. Performance Max is a new campaign type.

I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It came out from Google and it’s really interesting because, you know, for years and years, we’ve been talking about the rise of automation in PPC. And that used to be like, okay, well, you can manage your bids automatically, or we’re going to have responsive search ads, which are automating that text.

But now you got performance max. And it’s really one campaign that’s going to show across a multitude of channels and it’s all automated. You have to put in just a few details about your business and Google’s automations will figure out keywords, they will figure out bids, they will figure out where to show the ad and all the things that we used to do.

So obviously this is a burning topic for many of you watching who may be PPC agencies, PPC experts. And the question is like where does this fit into my larger strategy? Where I’ve maybe already built out an amazing account and now there’s this new thing that’s automated. It has a lot of promise, but how do I bring it into the mix?

And so to talk about that we decided Nobody better to help us get into the weeds and the details And talk about some of that than google the people who created performance max So i’m really happy that we have two guests from google and we’re going to be talking today about performance max. So welcome to PPC Town Hall

All right. That’s quite a title there, right? Google explains everything. So here from Google to help us. Figure out the details. Rodney Ip and Sagar Shah. Welcome to the show guys.

Rodney Ip: Thanks for having us Fred. Happy to be here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So Rodney, tell us what you do at Google.

Rodney Ip: So I’m a global product lead at Google in the Google ads team.

I’ve been at Google for around eight years now. And you can probably tell from my accent originally from Australia, but based in the New York office now working in the Google ads team over there. So the global product lead at Google ads oversees the go to market strategy of new products and Google ads and making sure that all of our customer feedback reaches our product teams as well.

So we continually improve our products. So yeah, that’s, that’s me in a nutshell. But yeah, thanks again for having us. We’re really excited to be here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. And first time we’re on PPC Town Hall. So and yeah, you said you collect a lot of the feedback and then make sure it gets to the product team.

And I guess that’s where Sagar comes in, right? So, Sagar, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Sagar Shah: Yeah, of course. So, first of all, thanks again for having me. Very excited to be here. So, my name is Sagar. I’m a product manager working on Performance Max. One of many product managers sort of and engineers who are sort of helping, helping build and shape this product.

Prior to this, I used to work on Google Ads marketing. So I spent a lot of time in our general sort of in the automation space within Google Ads. I’m excited to talk about this today.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. So, hey, what we did for this session, we actually went on social media and told our listeners and viewers to just tell us what questions they had so that we can really shape the conversation based on what’s top of mind.

So, but before we go into that you know, let’s maybe set the framework here a little bit and talk about what performance max campaigns are. Right. So we got a few slides on that and then we’ll dive into questions. So Rodney, why don’t you walk us through maybe a little bit of the high level?

Rodney Ip: Yeah, sounds good.

Thanks Fred. So performance max campaigns is the newest campaign type to launch in Google ads. The product teams have been hard at work for several years building this product to deliver more better results for our customers using automation. So Fred, I think you touched on this before. It’s a campaign type.

That runs across all Google ads channels. So search display, discover Gmail maps from a single campaign and it uses automation to to find where ads should be placed to efficiently drive new customers for our advertisers.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice, and that’s kind of exciting, right? Because I think most people watching, they all grew up in the days of search campaigns and then of course display campaigns were turned on and all of us caught on to that.

But then you got your newer stuff like discover campaigns Gmail campaigns local campaigns, smart shopping campaigns, right? So, so and there, it takes a different set of expertise to really run these campaigns really well. But it sounds like what you have built here is really, is this the easy button to get onto all of these channels?

Rodney Ip: Sagar, would you like to take this question? Yeah,

Sagar Shah: I’m happy to. Or is

Frederick Vallaeys: it understating what the power of this tool is?

Sagar Shah: Yeah, so look, I, I don’t, I don’t know that it’s necessarily the, like, easy button or the way we think about it. In the sense that, you know, simplification is one of the goals when it comes to at least making it easier.

Like, we did hear a lot of feedback from advertisers. That we, you know, you provide sort of, there’s, there’s a lot of, it’s, it’s, it’s complicated, like, you know, seven, 10 different campaign types, and it’s sort of challenging to understand, like, what the right mix of campaign types should be to make sure that I’m actually getting the best performance out of Google Ads.

So, so simplification, I’d say, is probably, in some ways, like, a secondary goal. I think, like, the goal, what we sort of realized when we took a look at the landscape is that there’s just a ton of performance headroom. Advertisers are not sort of always necessarily fully taking advantage of like the full breadth of inventory that Google Ads has to offer.

And we’ve made all these like progress and sort of like these advancements in sort of some of our like ML and AI technology and we’ve seen them play out really well in like a smart bidding context. And so can we start to sort of, you know, build a campaign that is purely focused on performance, right?

It’s kind of in the name for that reason, like our goal is. Is not necessarily to sort of simplify but to just provide advertisers with sort of a campaign that can truly go out and maximize conversion with conversion value for them. And there’s a bunch of stuff that like is still needed for that, right?

You still need to set up the right goals, you still need to sort of ensure that you’re like steering like our automation tools in the right way with the right creatives, with the right like first party audience lists. And we should talk to some of that today. But, but I know, yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit of both, right?

I think we can also make life a little bit simpler. While we’re delivering a much more value, I think we’ll be very happy.

Frederick Vallaeys: So it sounds like it, I mean, it serves people who might not have the sophistication to figure out these campaigns individually, but it also sounds like thanks to the automation and the AI, it can be highly beneficial for even advanced advertisers.

So it really serves a lot of people. Right now, one question that we did get and I want to jump into and for all the questions, so we’re just going to show them up on the screen right here. But who asked it so Nicholas was asking can we have these campaigns? Basically, can we pick and choose the channels that they run onto?

Right, or would you allow us to set bit adjustments for the different channels if we say We really care about getting onto discover, but maybe youtube is deprioritized a bit.

Sagar Shah: Yeah, so this is a really good question I think with Performance Max, our intent, right, is to sort of try and shift the mindset towards like a goal, like a goals oriented focus. So, so for now, sort of, we don’t explicitly have the ability to remove specific channels from PMAX. But in some ways, if, I don’t, if you actually express your goals correctly, or rather sort of express the goals that are, that matter to your business, right, and here you can keep getting closer and closer to what is ground truth.

So the actual conversions that matter, the actual sales that matter, the actual sort of converted leads, you know, setting values for those kinds of leads. Like we’ll actually, and you sort of, we’re not driving value from some of these channels, right? Like our bidding systems will just stop spending on those channels.

And so I think the, the challenge here will be for like us as Google to provide the right kinds of controls and inputs. so that you can express those goals to us. You know, we have things like conversion value rules. We’ll have things around sort of new customer acquisition and so on, which will also sort of start to get at this.

We’re really sort of looking for feedback as to how can you make it easy for you to express your goals to us. So that the sort of our bidding systems can basically do exactly that, right? Which is we, you won’t end up spending on a specific channel if it’s not valuable to you, or if it doesn’t drive conversion to conversion.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I think historically we all have this mindset as advertisers that we measure conversion rates on different channels, on different placements, on different keywords. And then we go in and we start reading and calling and maybe adding some new keywords based on things that we see have high conversion rates.

But ultimately I think what you’re saying which I’ve been advocating in my book, for example, for a, for a while is you just got to tell the machines what you actually care about. And then you don’t need to do all that tedious detail management. So I think that’s kind of what you’re saying there as well.

Hey we’ve got a video that was submitted by one of our viewers. And they’ve got sort of a question embedded in that. So let’s roll that video and see what they think about performance. Back.

Viewer: So for the last couple of months, we’ve been hard at work testing performance max, kind of seeing how, how it’s different from smart shopping, but also finding out like how the search component really works and, and how to integrate it into existing accounts, because that’s mainly something that that’s, that’s more challenging.

Where is it cannibalizing versus not how can we stop it from cannibalizing? How to best deal with that but for the next couple of months, I think the, we will continue to test to kind of then come up with a, with a strategy to see whether it makes sense to keep running smart shopping, evolving into performance max, or whether we need to think more about an alternative to what we’re doing with smart shopping right now.

So that’s kind of where we’re at. So that was Dennis Moons asking the question. So thank you, Dennis, for watching the show and submitting that question. I think the the question there was really about cannibalization, right? So you know, you, you were basically saying like, listen, run all of these channels together.

Frederick Vallaeys: There’s not a lot of control about which ones you include or exclude. So what happens for someone who’s already running a search campaign or a display campaign or a shopping campaign? What sort of, you know, How do people think about is the traffic going to go to the performance max campaign or is it going to stay with the existing campaigns you have?

Sagar Shah: This is a great question. So I’ll break my answer up into, I think, two buckets. One for smart shopping campaigns in particular, and then I think one for the other kinds of campaigns. So starting with smart shopping campaigns. Performance Max is prioritized if you’re running in the same CID, which is the same customer account.

Performance Max is prioritized over Smart Shopping campaigns and regular shopping campaigns in that account for a given set of products. This is, this is similar to what Smart Shopping, this is similar to how Smart Shopping campaigns and Standard Shopping campaigns work today. So, Smart Shopping campaigns sort of are prioritized over Standard Shopping campaigns today.

And then with the upgrade coming, Later this year you know, so performance max gets prioritized or smart shopping campaigns as well. So

Frederick Vallaeys: Sorry, just to pause on that for a second, right when you talk about the upgrade you talk about basically the migration So existing smart shopping campaigns will become upgraded to performance max campaigns when that happens, by the way is that still a situation where now you used to do smart shopping now?

You’re in performance max and so you get all six other channels You On by default or is that a special type of performance max campaign?

Sagar Shah: Yeah, so that’s a good question So i’ll reply to that and then we should go into the second bucket So so it is you do get the other channels and the other inventory as well.

So what we’ve seen is that advertisers So we’ve had performance max for advertisers with the gmcp essentially, you know, the equivalent of smart shopping campaigns running for a while we launched it last november and we’ve seen that advertisers who are actually using this version of performance max Do you see an increase in conversion value at the same or less and a lot of that can increase in conversion value comes from the sort of additional inventory that is also available.

So the short answer to your question is yes. We also highly encourage advertisers to go and add you know, ensure that they have like one revisit and review their creative assets and make sure that sort of those are all set up correctly for performance management. to be able to then deliver this additional conversion value.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Makes sense.

Sagar Shah: Coming back to your other, like, so the other bucket, which is, you know, how do you, for all this other inventory, how do you think about performance max and existing campaigns in the account? I think one sort of metaphor or one analogy that’s, that’s worked well for me, at least when explaining this is, it’s not that fundamentally different from adding another campaign type of that same channel to your account.

So if you add another search campaign or another. Display campaign to your account. You know, ultimately what gets selected for the auction is a function of, you know, the relevance of the ad, the, you know, how, like the likelihood of conversion for a specific audience. And so in some ways, so we’ll end up like the auction will end up selecting like the best ad for the given user in that specific context and Performance Max is just another source that can deliver on that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and so that’s interesting, right? Because. I want to hear from you as well, but like this technical detail is really interesting to me. So I think with shopping, there has always been that prioritization of the smart shopping campaign just supersedes regular shopping. And so it’s not necessarily the case that it’s going to select the best between the two.

It just says, if I can find something great from smart shopping, that’s going to, that’s going to be right. Always, even if I have a choice from the other campaign type as well, I think in search, what you’re saying is that it makes a lot of sense. So you have the different keywords that could there might be broad match keywords, right?

So did they equally Fit that query that the user did but google has recently made a lot of efforts and i’m sure you can share about that But but efforts to say that if you have a keyword that’s an exact match to the query That doesn’t mean exact match keyword, right? That just means the words are the same then google is starting to do a better job prioritizing that one because that’s your Advertiser preference that you’ve indicated and so even if the machine thinks hey something else might rank better it is giving a little bit more weight to what you as an advertiser decided.

Sagar Shah: That that’s exactly right. So in some ways, right, I think in like, and we hear this feedback a lot, right? Which is have branded campaigns in my account. How do I make sure that moments max sort of is not going to serve on that traffic. And what you just described, Fred is sort of one mechanism that can help with that because, you know, certainly exact match keywords for sure.

But essentially if you have a query that exactly matches to a keyword campaign in your account. That will take priority over performance. I think like in other contexts and in many ways that that sort of serves that brand use case and that keyword, right? I think in other contexts, if there is you know, it’s more of a sort of non brand use case where it’s really about finding that serving the right ad to drive the user to convert or to sort of get that sale, et cetera, then things like ad rank and sort of create a relevance and.

You know, like, you know, conversion and all of those things.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s ultimately the challenge is the machine. In any sort of machine learning, the machine makes decisions, and it’s often hard to understand how that decision was made. But again, it goes to the point that if we’ve taught the machine in the right way by giving it actual business wins, and that’s the conversion data we send to Google, then it is in a more likely position to do the job we wanted it to do.

If we give it half baked information. You know, and then we can’t really expect as many great results. Rodney, what are your thoughts on all of this?

Rodney Ip: Yeah, that’s exactly it for it. I think you hit the nail on the head there. As long as we’re providing our automation with the right data, it will go out and try and deliver the best outcomes for our advertisers.

And I wanted to add that we’re seeing this quite a bit with our current performance max advertisers. So even for advertisers that are using, you know, broad match and value based bidding, all the search best practices, they’re They’re still able to add a performance max campaign alongside which runs along search to increase their reach even further and find conversions.

They might have otherwise missed So it is a good complementary, to existing search campaigns, which I think was nicholas’s original question So yeah, don’t don’t be don’t be afraid to test it out alongside search because it can deliver some good results

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s okay. So we got a couple more slides here.

So Let’s jump into the best practices and actually performance max benefits, right? So the first key benefit that you’ve both already addressed is you’ll find more you’ll find more conversions for your goals. And what that means, like you’ve both alluded to, it’s a really conversion driven goal driven campaign and talk a little bit about the goals, right?

I think there’s been an evolution within Google about how goals are specified.

Rodney Ip: Yeah, exactly. So we have. migrated over to a new goal framework. And it does revolve around goals. So as you see on the, on the screen, rather than conversion types. So this is really important because it sounds like actually a lot of Optmyzr fans out there are using smart shopping, which was a campaign.

That’s very similar to our campaign targeted towards retailers. So only really targeted towards the online sales goals. So Performance Max is actually bringing that similar experience to more of our Google Ads customers. So for instance lead gen advertisers can now run one single Performance Max campaign.

That runs across search, video, display, discover, maps, et cetera, to drive more leads and leverage that automation and increase their lead volume even more at, at, at, at efficient our allies. So we are trying to bring this automated cross channel experience to more of our customers, and we also target offline goals as well.

So if you’re your business that wants to drive more foot traffic to your brick and mortar, we support that in performance max as well. So we’re really expanding. The the benefits of cross channel automated campaigns to all google ads users And we’re seeing some good results so far So I think so far it seems like this goal goal approach is working well

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice, and then another shift that’s happened is now you have primary and secondary goals we’ve talked about that a little bit on previous episode, but for those who missed that Sagar can can you maybe say a word on what that means?

What is a primary goal?

Sagar Shah: Yeah, absolutely. So Essentially the way to think about primary goals is very similar to Previously, when you had conversion actions, right, you could sort of select checkbox, which said include this in my conversions column. And then when you did that, that sort of showed up in your conversions column.

And that was what our automation systems optimized to when you selected a target CPA or a target ROAS bid strategy a primary conversion action. So basically in this case, within a goal, you can have both primary actions and secondary action. And so if a campaign is optimizing towards a specific goal, The primary actions are the ones that will show up in the conversions column and be seen by our automation tools and optimize tool.

The secondary actions will essentially show up in the all conversions column and it’s something that you can observe but it’s not something that our, that our systems are actually actively seeing and driving and optimizing. And so a

Frederick Vallaeys: goal would be something like my, my real goal for my business is purchases or lead generation so kind of these buckets and then within the buckets you have primary and secondary goals.

And the primary ones, they contribute towards bid optimization.

Sagar Shah: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but I’ve always been curious. So Google says it matters for bid optimization, but bids are related to a lot of things, right? So does that ultimately mean that what I set as my primary action might also influence which broad match keyword variations I would show up for, or other things besides just bids?

Sagar Shah: So, so I think the way I would, I think you said two important things there. So I think one is sort of maybe, Whatever, so one general principle we try to follow is whatever shows up in the conversions column, right, is what our automation systems are seeing and optimizing to. And as you pointed out, like, you know, the primary, like, framing around this has been around smart bidding and automated bids.

And I think that that’s still largely true. But we are thinking about, right, like we often get questions off the form, hey, like, you have all of these different, you know, mechanisms, right? You sort of have essentially bidding systems, but you also have like targeting systems around some of these keywords and so on.

Shouldn’t all of those be pointed towards essentially maximizing, like using basically predicting the likelihood of conversion and then maximizing conversions. And I think basically like we’re, we’re sort of doing that more and more. And as our systems evolve I think that’s a reasonable way to think about it, which is whatever shows up in the convergence column is what is, It’s fair game for our automation systems to try and optimize and maximize to like that’s the objective function and we’re going to try and give you as much as much of that thing that you tell us as as we can.

And by can I also mean conversions and conversion value column right so if you’re using target Ross or max conversion value. It’s the conversion value piece that we’ve tried.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes sense. Here we had a question from Derek, which kind of leads or goes with these conversions, but a lot of advertisers, they’ve thought about maybe a YouTube campaign for upper funnel activity and then a search campaign for lower funnel activity or having different conversions associated to traditionally campaigns, but now they’re saying, hey, could we do this at the asset group?

So to what degree do you think people need to worry about sort of that granularity of conversions? And what about conversion types that happen at different stages of the sales cycle? Rodney, do you have any thoughts on that one?

Rodney Ip: Yeah. So I’ll let Saga talk to the lower funnel conversions and upper funnel conversions.

What I do want to mention here is that performance max is a primarily performance driven campaign that does rely on conversion goals as the target for the campaign. But when we’re talking about trying to reach KPIs that are outside performance, so for example driving awareness or driving consideration.

So for awareness, maybe that KPI might be reached. We still have our other campaigns that are aimed at driving that and performance max doesn’t have these goals at the moment. Sorry. We still do recommend, you know, running your in stream video on YouTube to drive your reach and complement it with performance max for your for your lower funnel and, and and other other sort of conversion types.

So Sagar, I’ll let you talk about the lower versus upper as well as micro versus macro.

Sagar Shah: That makes sense. So to build on what Rodney said, essentially you know, I think of performance max. as in the same way as like other performance campaigns that advertisers have. Essentially the, the, the closer you get to sort of ground truth again, and it’s, it’s actually, you can think of it very similar to how you think about your search fund bidding campaign, right?

That’s running target CPA or your sort of shopping campaign that’s driving sales for you. The, the, the closer you get to actually reporting the conversions that matter for your business. The better a job that the performance max automation can do for you in terms of actually maximizing those conversions.

Now, one thing that is really actually powerful is data driven attribution or DDA has also sort of expanded recently to sort of cover more of this like cross channel scope. And so, in this world where you, where you do have all of these sort of, you know, interweaving touch points across all of these different surfaces as users are trying to make decisions, coupling something like DDA and sort of The credit that it attributes across the funnel, right?

But something like performance max, which can then serve on all of that inventory is actually sort of where we see a pretty big unlock here. Because you now don’t have to worry in about the funnel in quite the same way. I think, you know, as Rodney said, we still don’t do upper, like we still don’t do the very upper funnel thing, which is, you know, if you just want a bunch of reach or if you, you know, aren’t sort of looking at performance as your main KPI then, then you should sort of make sure that you’re running campaigns that actually get you that.

From a performance perspective, though, this sort of coupling of like attribution and and this sort of cross channel serving along with, you know, like smart bidding systems that are effectively finding the next cheapest conversion of conversion value across all of this inventory. And allocating your spend efficiently is why we’ve seen.

A lot of sort of positive feedback.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. So thanks to data driven attribution You no longer really need to worry about what’s upper mid and lower funnel Because all of those interactions get measured and so long as you’ve identified what is your real goal at the end It will recognize that the youtube campaign is helping and is assisting, but it’s usually not the place.

It’s not the last click attribution that they would have gotten. Right. So historically we would have managed that separately because we would have set a lower target for that because we knew it was helping, but not driving the final sale. But now thanks to DDA that is baked into the learning models and we don’t have to worry about that level of detail.

So that makes a ton of sense. Now, one question that we also got was new customer acquisition, right? So and this is also speaking a little bit to the fact and maybe smart shopping campaigns. One of the major complaints was, hey, it’s focusing too much on remarketing. So it’s getting me. Back, someone who’s already coming through my SEO channel or an existing customer, it’s just getting them to come back.

How do I not quote unquote waste my money on that part that maybe I don’t care so much about? How do I make sure I really get lots of new customers? And so I think that question came up because this is not as well known, but I believe there’s a beta for that, right? So let’s talk about that.

Sagar Shah: Yes.

So, yeah, I think like to, to the previous question, right? So new customer acquisition is definitely here to stay. In fact, we’re, we’re doubling down on it with performance packs. So where there’s a current beta, we will sort of have that out to the market fairly soon. And the, the idea is essentially, is essentially as you, as you find out here, right?

I think the idea is that, you know, if for advertisers who want to optimize towards new customers you’ll have options, a few different kinds of options to do so in terms of essentially ensuring that you’re either indicating how you value these customers So that our campaigns can bring you more of those or sort of specifying more directly that hey I’m really interested in new customers only and so those are some of the variations that we’re currently working through right

Frederick Vallaeys: now And how do people get into that beta?

Sagar Shah: You can reach out to your google ads rep and then we can sort of it’ll follow through to us and we’re happy to get you into the beta. I’ll also just mention that we’re you should certainly do that We’re also very close to sort of launching this. So so it shouldn’t be You Too much, right?

Before it’s generally the greatest one is my scissors.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, so that’s the new customer question. And then the second benefit of performance. Max is Google describes. It is about just getting more value from that same budget. So some wrong if I don’t want to take this and walk us maybe through the budget components.

Rodney Ip: Yeah, sounds good. So we do. We do leverage automated bidding and automated targeting as well. Coupled with a data driven attribution to make sure that we’re finding customers wherever they are across Google ads inventory, whether they’re searching or browsing on the display network or watching videos on YouTube, we always try and use automation and data driven attribution to see where the customer is and whether they can whether they’re ready to convert and place ads in front of them.

So It’s always a good best practice to implement data driven attribution. So performance max can again have that data, the best optimized towards the networks and interactions that are most likely to convert. And on average, we are seeing pretty good results when our performance max campaigns are run on average, an increase of 30 percent total income, incremental conversions at a similar ROI.

So that’s even on top of their existing campaigns, which is which is a good way for, you know, customers to keep growing with Google ads.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice, nothing wrong with incremental conversions at the same cost, right? Now, and a lot of these questions, I have to apologize, but they’re kind of like harping on the same thing.

So I think we’ve already kind of answered this, but the question was framed differently. So people are basically saying, can we set different monthly budgets? And I think they mean by like the different channels that are covered.

Sagar Shah: So I think maybe I can take a stab at, there’s a few different potential paths on this one.

So I’m happy to, like, try and touch on a couple of them. So I think in this case, so we don’t, I think to your framing, Fred, we don’t today have a way of specifying budgets by channels, right? In some ways, and look, I think like we’ll, we’ll, we’re going to continue to hear feedback on sort of from all of you on in terms of like what works best and what makes the sense, what makes sense here.

But I think like part of the unlocker where we get value from performance management. It’s being able to like allocate this budget dynamically, right? Like in real time across all of these channels. And so if you were to set monthly budgets across specific channels, then you, you’re going back to just having regular like search and display and you know, other campaign types that you’re already running in your account because then you’re constraining the ability of like the system.

So let’s say that system says, Hey, you know, this user is much more likely, like there’s an impression, a potential impression on, on YouTube. That is much more likely to convert our potential impression on sort of search. That’s not likely to convert, but the budget sort of doesn’t exist because you’ve set a sub budget, then we won’t be able to sort of find that acquire and capture that user for you in order to sort of drive that sales.

So I think that’s why we don’t have today. At least we don’t have specific. Breakdowns of budgets across different networks. Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s talk about the next benefit here of performance max. So this is about the rich and transparent insights. Personally, I think that’s the one that I have the most questions about because yes, they are rich insights, but I would argue they are probably less data than what we’re used to getting.

Frederick Vallaeys: But again, I mean, so in this age of automation, does that actually matter that we get less data? Right. And there’s some level of new data, like about audiences that Google is giving. So let’s take a look at what that is. So, Rodney, do you want to walk us through sort of this benefit from Google’s perspective?

Rodney Ip: Yeah, sounds good. So, You’re completely correct, Fred. We do have a different way of looking at reporting and insights in Performance Max because Performance Max is automated. We don’t have a lot of sort of exportable data heavy reports. What we try to do instead is we try and glean insights to Show a little bit about what automation is doing.

So this new insights tool within performance max actually curates cards that show you what might be causing fluctuations in your performance max campaign. That might be seasonality. That might be a change that you made to your accounts. So it does pull in change history information. But also it gives you insights into who’s engaging with your ad as well.

So like what type of audiences and eventually we’re actually also going to show audiences and which type of creatives and, and assets resonated with them best. So you can optimize your creative as well. So we really are leaning in on the insights that are actionable. So. actionable being, you can update your creative assets to drive even more engagement and grow, grow your results even more, or provide you information on what’s going on with automation within performance specs.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’m hoping that those asset level details will also come to RSAs, just a little bit more data. So we can like cause actually one question that somebody was asking how much data do you need? And that’s one frustration with RSAs is that you need like 5, 000 impressions asset to really get some, some insights. You know, how many conversions do you need to really do well with a performance max campaign?

Rodney Ip: Yeah, so I think in terms of driving insights, it starts at around a thousand impressions and a hundred clicks or engagements. So the threshold

Frederick Vallaeys: is that per month,

Rodney Ip: per month, correct? Yes. So that that’s when the insights start appearing.

And then the different cards have different sort of thresholds as well. And the, your, your Google reps should be able to shoot over a doc that demonstrates what these thresholds are. But some of the thresholds might be, for example how much search volume you’re getting. Like we require a certain amount of days of search volume in order to, you know, glean a meaningful insight.

So it really depends on the insights card that you’re looking at. But I think the general premise is that the longer you run your performance max campaign for, the more insights you’ll have as you go along.

Sagar Shah: I’ll just add to that. So one thing I do want to sort of separate here is, The, you know, the insights reporting, right, which were certainly like there’s, we think about thresholds in order to make sure that we’re aggregating enough data to show you something that’s meaningful and not just noise versus from just an effectiveness, like perspective, like what sort of how many conversions do you need for a performance max campaign to do a good job, right?

And I think like, Again, like, in some ways, like, it’s a reasonable analogy here to also, like, think back to what we think of, like, within the smart bidding world, right? So I think, like, generally speaking, like, performance max campaigns do sort of learn from all of the data in your account. So you don’t necessarily need to be accruing conversions on the performance max campaign for our systems to be actually, already have a sense for, you know, who are the kinds of users who are more likely to convert for you.

And so there is, you know, there isn’t, like, sort of, to maybe directly answer the question, like, we don’t have a minimum. Conversion limit. Anywhere sort of specified or in the U. I. In part because we sort of we find that our systems do a reasonable job. And again, this is debatable. Like, I’m sure folks are the way this, but, like, sort of, we find that, like, our systems are able to benefit from sort of the data and the advertisers account already sort of broadly speaking.

I think where the where the challenge comes is if you have very few conversions a month, right on the order of, let’s say, five conversions a month. Like 10 conversions a month and you have it’s sometimes it’s really hard to measure how well We’re actually hitting your cpa target or your ROAS target both for like in some ways like there’s just noise in that evaluation even like when you’re looking at the report itself because You know if you get five conversions a month on average like some months you may get three conversions other months You may get 10 conversions And so the cpa will be really noisy and so it’s hard to actually know whether we’re meeting your goal And so sort of the typical like you know recommendation.

And this, by the way, also ties with this question of like, how deep in the funnel do I go? Right? Because the deeper you go, often the lower the frequency of the actual conversion. And so I think the typical, like, what I’ve seen works well is sort of going deep enough that you’re like getting as close to ground like truth as possible, while having some volume that it’s actually sort of reasonable to be able to measure performance against a CPA target or a ROAS target.

And so that’s kind of how I would think about it in terms of like how many conversions you need. Like there, there isn’t a minimum because we’re trying to sort of, you know, you’re trying to sort of drive some of these benefits from the cross learning we do across your campaigns. But it is helpful to think about volume.

Frederick Vallaeys: So if you’re an agency, this is one of the value adds that you can bring is like finding that sweet spot of the right type of conversion at the right sort of volume to make these campaigns work really well. Sort of on the flip side of this, right? We talked about having too few conversions, but what about those advertisers that have tons of conversions and they have more than one account?

So you were saying it learned from the account. And before you were saying within the CID, the account ID, it kind of goes with the search campaign and the performance max campaign. What happens if you have an MCC or a multiple linked accounts for a single business that does that also get covered?

Sagar Shah: I should have been more specific. So we learned that the conversion tracking, Sort of account level. So if that is a, you know, an MCC that’s sort of the level at which it happens if it’s a specific you know Account it will happen. So we do sort of benefit from training across the data in that conversion tracking

Frederick Vallaeys: So basically the same way that smart bidding works It looks at the conversion action level and you ultimately have to say whether that’s MCC account or campaign level well, so talking about like insights and rich metrics You The most common question we got was, hey, can we have more metrics?

So here’s a number of points. We don’t need to look through all of them, but it’s a frequent question. So what sort of plans does Google have as far as showing richer data or is what we’re getting today sort of kind of what we should expect for the next couple of years?

Sagar Shah: Yeah, go ahead, Rod.

Rodney Ip: Yeah, I just want to say here just in general and being, the global product lead. We do collect a lot of feedback. So all of this feedback is fantastic. That these are the sort of metrics that our customers want to see. So I think yeah, I think like we are we launched in November, so we’re still a pretty early stage product and we are still continually improving it.

So all of this feedback and these questions and requests are fantastic. Please do keep them coming. But yeah, in terms of the current state, I’ll let saga elaborate on that.

Sagar Shah: Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say something similar, right? Like, the product is like, we’re very sort of confident in where we are today.

We’ve seen a ton of great, you know, uplift for advertisers. We wouldn’t be recommending an upgrade from smart shopping campaigns, local campaigns to performance max if we hadn’t. I think the, but it is an evolving product, right? If you sort of, this, this is certainly not, you know, we’re, we’re paying very close attention to this feedback.

We want to make sure that we know that, you know, things like. Being able to optimize assets in terms of like, is an important lever. We know that sort of being able to actually like, you know, tune sort of the campaign and parameters and sort of, you know, match like the right insights and reporting to the levers that we have is important.

So we’re, we’re looking at this very, very closely and we know that, you know, obviously there’s a balance, like we have to, we want to be able to provide the stuff based on your feedback so that advertisers are comfortable. You know, trying performance max and sort of growing performance max and so on. So just watch the space is what I’ll say.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I use all the feedback channels that you have talked to your account manager, talked to Rodney and his team. And then by the way, everyone who submitted questions, even if I didn’t put the question up in the session today, like all of it has gone in the Google sheet, Google has access to it.

So. They will be taking this back and listening to it. All right, so the fourth benefit is using the best of automation. And that’s, again, a long running story. We know about bid management. We know about creative. But let’s talk about one of the newer components here in this campaign type, which is audience optimization.

So, Rodney, you want to walk us through how that one kind of works?

Rodney Ip: Yeah, absolutely, Fred. So we’re really excited about this one. I think with Performance Max, we, we are taking the approach of allowing our users to steer our automation rather than just letting automation do its own thing. So in terms of audiences, we, we do know that a lot of our advertisers today have a lot of learnings about which audiences resonate best with their, with their brand and, and their ads.

So we, we do have this feature called audience signals, which allows you to input some of this data to feed out our automation and allow, allow automation to learn from the user. And in terms of like the user being the advertiser that’s importing their data. So we have seen really good results in this so far.

It does speed up the campaign learning period. So we deliver conversions quicker to performance max campaigns than if audience signals were not used at the start.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes. Okay. And so I mean, we live in a world where third party data is going away. So first party data is becoming more important.

So I would just tell people, hey, focus on building those email lists, get to know who your customers who visit your website are. And then push those audiences back into google to run your ads with your first party data that’s going to be a big theme I think for a number of years to come All right, but let’s jump into getting started and some practical advice And again, some of these questions are going to be repetitive, but they are important.

So how do you make sure that with performance max you get results that actually matter to your business as opposed to you know sort of dummy results that Don’t matter that much to you.

Rodney Ip: Yeah, I can start and saga. You’re probably going to be more thorough than myself here. So there are a few best practices that we, we do advise when you set up your performance max campaign.

One of them being make sure performance max is targeting the right conversion goals that drive results for your business. So if that is a store visit, or if that is a online sale, or if that is a lead generation, then make sure we’re, we’re targeting those conversion goals with Performance Max.

Otherwise yeah Performance Max, it, it won’t default to any conversion goal, but it’s, it’s always good to check on that. Also good to actually use values with conversion goals as well. So you can tell our automation how important each goal is to your business. So our automation can prioritize driving those high value conversion goals over less Important goals.

So there are two that we definitely advise. There’s a few others that are like vertical marketing objectives specific. So for lead generation advertisers, we definitely advise that they use the offline conversion upload feature to tell automation, which sort of leads. resulting in sales and generating revenue for their business.

And then for retailers, we definitely advise uploading your Google merchant center feed to performance max. And if you have a offline presence as well uploading your Google, my business feed as well. Cause performance max will utilize those to make sure that they’re driving the, the conversion goals that are important for your business.

So saga, I’m not sure if you have anything to add on top of that.

Sagar Shah: No, nothing more. I think like in summary, like if you can, if you can get your like risk, like your, the business results you care about to sort of represent them as accurately as possible in a conversion and conversion value column, right.

Performance max will maximize that. If there’s a disconnect and then there’s, you sort of, you have to manage that a bit more.

Frederick Vallaeys: And honestly, I think that’s one of the things advertisers have focused far too little on because it hasn’t been necessary, but with automation just becoming so strong, that is the way you optimize your accounts is by.

Reporting correct conversions. And so we wrote a blog post that was really about smart bidding and how to feed that better information. But I think that’s equally applicable to performance max campaign. So check out that blog post. And then there’s a more recent thing that Google introduced, which is enhanced conversions for leads, which is a really easy way to do offline conversion imports.

Basically it doesn’t require the GCLID, which a lot of advertisers have gotten stuck on how to put that into their CRM. So. If what I just said doesn’t mean anything to you at least think of enhanced conversions for leads go look that up And make sure you’re using that that’s going to really help your performance max campaigns.

All right I want to talk about account structure for a minute here. So again, this is the concern that Are we going to see cannibalization of some sort? How do we prevent that? So let’s get real specific for a second. Let’s maybe start with search campaigns So if I have a search campaign and I have brand terms in that, how do I prevent performance max from cannibalizing those branded search keywords?

Sagar Shah: So this goes back to the conversation we were having a little bit earlier, where if you have branded keywords in keyword campaigns in an account and you have queries that exactly match those keywords those will be prioritized for performance max. We’re generally also taking the feedback on performance max and brand terms and all these And thinking about how we evolve in this space.

But but what I just described is is a reasonable way to ensure that your brand keywords are sort of matching to your brand queries.

Frederick Vallaeys: Is there something we can do for its brand safety? What can advertisers do for that?

Sagar Shah: So we are sort of we have we’ve mentioned this I think in previous posts, but we are also sort of looking at negative keywords at the account level as another feature that’s sort of on the roadmap coming Reasonably soon, and that might also help from a brand safety perspective.

So today with performance max campaigns We don’t have sort of you don’t have the ability to put in negative key words Into your campaign, but we will sort of have this account level feature which which is targeted towards that safety So I think that should also help from that

Frederick Vallaeys: perspective and I don’t think I’m divulging any secrets here I think this is an old thing, but you can ask your rep to put in negative keywords for you On the performance max campaigns.

But it sounds like that might become more self service, right? You don’t have to call your rep. It sounds like you might be working on that. And then it does sound like you’re saying as well, account level negatives, such as placements, keywords, those would be respected by the performance max campaign.

Sagar Shah: Yeah. So there’s basically, so in many ways, so when you think about like your account level brand safety features today things like content and so on. They spend exclusions as well. Those will be respected by performance max campaigns in addition to sort of this account level feature that I started. Yeah So and to your point like we are again, maybe it’s worth mentioning here, right? like traditionally in in search campaigns people think of negative keywords as a way of shaping traffic to Drive like to deliver like the most performance, right? And I think like the balance that we’re trying to strike here is it, again, it comes back to this, right?

Like, there’s various flavors, questions of the form. Can I exclude certain channels? Can I exclude certain placements? Can I exclude certain keywords, et cetera? And I think what we’re trying to sort of, you know, and I, as you mentioned, it is a, it is a shift, and I think we’ll have to sort of make sure we’re doing this, like, very thoughtfully.

We’re trying to sort of move to a world where, like, you specify your goal to us, and then, like, you know, we will bid down on all of those things. So, so in this case, when we do sort of have some of the, the account level negatives come out, like, I think the focus there will be less about traffic shaping if you will, and we’re thinking about it in that way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Makes sense. And we’re gonna go fast here because so many good questions, so many good answers, but we’re running out of time. But asset optimization is something we haven’t really covered all that much. And Rodney, I know you, you did talk about it sort of in the same light as RSAs. But I think advertisers would like to see a little bit more guidance here.

We also had a great question about somebody who said we run promotions in ads. So it’s not that question, but they run promotions and so they need to do ad scheduling, basically. Is Google thinking about any of those things about business data and add customizers and add assets and kind of bringing all that great technology together?

Rodney Ip: So I can start on the feedback regarding the lack of metrics and individual assets and what our best practices are here. So, so we definitely advise uploading as many assets as you can. Cause the more assets we have, the better automation will work. This feedback on the screen right now is really good feedback though, that the current metrics aren’t, aren’t aren’t indicative enough of like, what the actions advertisers should be taking.

And we, we had heard this before, and we, we, we have been building some insights cards for this purpose. So one that’s coming up soon is that we will have the, the insight card that shows your audiences. And which assets resonated with them best. So you should be able to start deriving themes around like, Hey, I’m an in boss in, in market for a new basketball.

And these are the sort of assets that are driving results for us so we can build them out further. So we will have more coming up in the near future on this.

Frederick Vallaeys: And how do you recommend the use of asset groups? So you’re basically saying upload as many assets as possible, but there are limits. Of what you can upload, right?

So are you saying make many asset groups? And if that’s what you’re saying, like, how do you think about what should each asset group contain?

Rodney Ip: Sagar, would you like to take the best practice on this?

Sagar Shah: Yeah, so so I would I would think of like asset groups as a way to sort of theme together the assets that you sort of Would want assembled into various creatives, right?

And so the unit sort of in some ways and and there’s a small difference here between performance max campaigns with But the GMC feed that targets specific products versus those that don’t, when you target specific products, then you can select the actual product groups or listing groups that you also want to associate with an asset group.

But basically, like I would think of the asset group as a way, as a way of sort of bundling together the relevant set of assets that will then, you know, help sort of the assembly of the right creative for advertisers in that sense. And so you can certainly have multiple asset groups. In a given campaign around sort of like how you choose to sort of bundle different assets together and the kind of creators that you want to show.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Makes sense. Good. So next question we have here. Okay. So assume we’re all on board. We want to do P. I’m sorry. I said P max performance max. How do we test it? How do we make sure it’s actually delivering on the promise? And we do have a Google slide that I wanted to show for that one.

Rodney Ip: Oh, fantastic.

I was hoping you’d show this thread. So yeah. Right now it is the pre and post framework that probably a lot of Optmyzr fans are pretty familiar with. Taking the previous period taking conversion lag time into account, and then comparing it to a post period to see if adding performance max drove better results than not having performance max there.

This is the current methodology, but we, we do have some exciting tools that are coming up in the future, which do this within the interface, so I’ll let Sagar talk about that.

Sagar Shah: Yeah, so, I think, yeah, I mean, basically, right, with the tools that we have today, sort of, we would recommend starting to test performance max, seeing if we’re delivering against ROAS goals that you’ve set, and then measuring if we’re driving more conversions or more conversion value for you.

And you can do that both at the performance max level, but you can also do that overall at the account level. Especially there are concerns around, you know, performance max shifting traffic and so on. You can get a sense for if other campaigns have been affected or not. I’d say like, that’s like sort of our best in terms of tooling at this point.

We are working on sort of some more rigorous tooling. And, you know, I don’t want to tease about it too much, but we can talk about it. You know, you’ll sort of start to see some of this come out and we’ll start to hear us talking about this in the coming months as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then we’ve already heard from a number of people who are very happy with Performance Max and their only frustration is they want to spend more money on it.

So if they, if you find yourself maxed out or in one case actually not spending that much money on it, any thoughts on how to scale it up?

Sagar Shah: Yeah. So there’s, there’s probably, I guess, you know, I can, I can suggest a few examples here, but then I can also talk about what we’re doing to sort of more systematically, you know, provide the right kind of guidance.

So I think in general one sort of setting to give a plug to is the setting called final URL expansion which essentially sort of maximizes if you set that on that it sort of increases the funnel of like search queries and performing search queries that we can target. And so I definitely like recommend turning that on.

Sort of ensure that like you have a video uploaded you know, we do sort of again folks are aware but we do auto generate videos as well if you don’t have videos uploaded from your assets, but we do recommend sort of actually uploading your own video because that typically sort of you know does tend to drive slightly better performance i’d say You know, we are from a we will have opti score and like recommendations for performance max also sort of coming soon.

So those are on the road map And so in that world, we’ll have things like, you know simulators which tell you, you know, if you change your target or your budget sort of what’s the impact on conversions or conversion value? If there are things that sort of there’ll be recommendations around ad strength as well as sort of ensuring that like your creatives are also sort of set up and performing There’ll be recommendations around audiences Cheers you know, attaching like the right first party audiences, making sure that those are generally those lists are being tracked in your account as well as sort of, you know you know, attach the signals like all of those things are also helpful to help the campaign scale overall and like unlock value and all of these, these different kinds of inventory.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, a lot of good recommendation there and I’ll take that back to my team and make sure we put that in our Optmyzr auditing capabilities to tell you if you’re causing yourself to not spend enough money on PMAX if you’re getting good results. That is kind of a tricky question. Maybe the answer is never, but somebody was asking, is there a scenario where performance max doesn’t actually make sense for an advertiser?

Rodney Ip: Yeah, I can take a stab at this. So there, I think I touched on this before around awareness and consideration. So there are certain goals that performance max doesn’t target today. So we do recommend that you continue using other Google ads formats for that. So if you’re a customer that wants to drive, you know awareness and your KPIs reach then use your YouTube video in stream for that.

So yeah, we do recommend more customers that are performance driven and that have conversion goals to, to use performance max. So I think that’s one scenario where we wouldn’t recommend performance max as the sole campaign. But that being said, it is good to run performance max alongside your awareness and consideration campaigns.

Frederick Vallaeys: Makes sense. All right, final question before we wrap it up here. So say that you’re still a little bit on the fence that you’re not quite sure you want to do Performance Max campaigns. And this is Dennis Moon, so who was asking the video question earlier, and I think the underlying tone of the question is, if I don’t get on board with Performance Max, like, will there be a point in the near future where my search campaign gets absorbed or upgraded to Performance Max?

Thanks. So is there like, what’s the risk for someone who doesn’t want to make that jump right now and maybe just wants to wait a couple months to see what happens with others?

Sagar Shah: So I think, look, I think it’s just worth saying it, although I’m sure it’s obvious to everyone, right? Like, we’re, we’re, we’re sort of trying, we’re hoping like the path for growth with Performance Max should be that we’re delivering a lot of really good value to advertisers.

And they’re sort of really happy with that value and they’re sort of willing to make the shift to Performance Max. I’d also say that, like, as we’ve seen with tools like Smart Bidding, right, like, and how they evolved, sort of, over the years from, like, Smart Bidding in 2016 is very different from what Smart Bidding in 2019 and 2021 today is, or 2022 now is, right?

And so, there will also be evolution here in terms of, Like the ability of our systems to drive like conversion and conversion value. So I think like my sort of general recommendation would be right certainly to start testing because there’s there’s sort of value To be had here in terms of sort of delivering more conversions and more conversion value for the business and then based on sort of the results that you see starting to sort of then decide if you want to scale that up further, or if you want to continue to run that alongside the existing campaigns that you have.

But really that’s, that’s the trade off, right? And our hope, like on our side, we’re going to do everything we can to make this better and better and better. And there’s a ton of investment going into it. So hopefully, like, we get there. But ultimately, the proof will be in terms of, like, whether advertisers actually see that value, and if the balance between the controls and the value is correct.

To be able to, like, actually allow them to go in.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think that’s a fantastic final point for this show. Sagar, Rodney, thank you so much. You’ve been fantastic guests. Thank you for taking us a little bit behind the curtain of what Google thinks and is doing on Performance Max. If people have questions, obviously there’s a lot of help material out there.

There’s a lot of webinars, talk happening on social media, so engage in that. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. I’m sure Performance Max will continue to be discussed as we learn more about it and as the whole thing evolves. But thank you so much for joining us. being my guests. Thank you everyone for watching and we will see you for the next episode.

Take care.