3 Things You Should Know About Google’s Performance Max Ad Campaigns

Automation. In our world of rapidly advancing technology, automation has become a major buzzword. People have many questions about automation and how it is going to affect jobs, daily activities (such as grocery shopping and driving a car), and society as we currently know it. These concerns are valid as we have already seen technology make major changes in our daily lives. However, automation, in many ways, is proof of a progressing society, and it affects and improves each industry differently.

According to Hubspot, “Marketing automation is software that handles routine marketing tasks without the need for human action.” Read on to learn how Google has implemented marketing automation in performance max campaigns.

What is a Performance Max Campaign?

The name somewhat speaks for itself. Performance Max campaigns were created to maximize your ads’ performance. Google Ads Support says, “Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.”

If you have been struggling to identify what network and what assets are best for your business ads, Performance Max campaign ads are shown and optimized for both Google’s Search and Display networks. This gives Google the ability to place your ads in front of the right customers, in the right place, and at the right time.

1. Setting Goals

First, like in any campaign creation, you must identify the goal of the campaign and identify what advertising conversions are most in line with your business goals. This is how Performance Max campaigns differ from Smart campaigns. While Smart campaigns prioritize sale conversions, you can choose multiple conversion goals with a Performance Max campaign.

Performance Max will appear as a campaign type when you choose “Leads,” “Sales,” “Website Traffic,” or “Local Store Visits and Promotions” as your campaign goal.

2. Creating a Campaign

Since Google will be picking and choosing which assets, headlines, and descriptions should be shown to each specific user and on each platform, add as many assets as you have available that align with your campaign goals. The more assets you include, the better Google will be able to adapt and target your ad for each specific user. This includes uploading your own video assets. If you do not upload your own video assets, Google will create its own video using the images and text you have added to the campaign.

Many users have complained that these automated videos are too generic and are not well aligned with their overall brand. This is why it is important to create your own business video assets to use across all marketing channels, including Google Ads.

3. Analyzing Your Results

Performance Max campaigns are still relatively new in the Google world. It is wise to continue to run other ad campaigns until you start to see your desired results from the Performance Max campaign. Because Performance Max campaigns are run by machine learning models, it typically takes two weeks before you will see results.

However, it can take up to six weeks to see any performance results. If you are seeing low-performance results or not seeing any results at all, it is likely that the machine model is still learning. After six weeks, contact Google Support if your ad is still not showing proper result metrics.

Is a Performance Max Campaign Right for My Business?

Feedonomics said it best: “What sets a Performance Max campaign apart is that it combines smart bidding and targeting features into a single goal-driven campaign across the entire Google network.” If you want your ads to be shown across YouTube, Display, Search, Shopping, Discover Feed, Gmail, and Maps and have the ability to set multiple campaign goals, Performance Max campaigns are right for you.

However, it is important to understand that you will be giving Google a lot more control over what ads they decide to show to each specific user. Optimizing your assets is crucial for showing on-brand ads to your audience. Google continues to show its desire to move toward complete automation. Given this, it is important for your business to stay up to speed and start to explore Google’s increasing world of machine learning.

Is your company feeling overwhelmed by Google’s constant changes and push toward more automation? Our team is eager to help you create a Google campaign that will bring qualified leads to your business. Connect with us to get started!