Performance Max campaign

Businesses can increase conversions with a Performance Max campaigns. This objective-based campaign allows advertisers to use all Google Ads channels and inventory. It is designed to help businesses find customers who are more likely to convert across all Google channels. This helps increase conversions and conversion values ​​while optimizing advertising costs most effectively. In this article, Ad Support will share useful information on how to create this campaign!

Introduction to Performance Max campaign

With the support of AI, Performance Max campaign targets the right audiences to achieve optimal performance and bidding strategies. The campaign leverages Smart Bidding and optimizes budgets, audience targeting, ad creatives, attribution models, and other critical factors. This helps identify the highest-performing placements across Google’s entire inventory and align campaign performance with business objectives.

In addition to using AI to optimize bids and ad placements for better conversions, providing essential input data—such as customer insights, high-quality text, images, and videos—can significantly enhance campaign performance.

Performance Max is an ideal choice if your advertising goal is a specific type of conversion. It’s also perfect for those aiming to maximize efficiency without being restricted to specific ad channels or who wish to access all Google advertising platforms while expanding reach and conversion value beyond traditional keyword search campaigns.

This campaign complements Search campaigns, helping businesses find high-quality potential customers across Google platforms such as YouTube, Display Network, Search Network, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. It also allows businesses to improve performance based on pre-defined conversion goals.

If you use Performance Max campaign with Google Ad Grants, note that these campaigns cannot run across the entire Google inventory. Instead, they will focus on specific formats aligned with advertising goals such as sales, lead generation, promotions, and local store visits.

Benefits of implementing a Performance Max campaign

Get more customers to convert

Implementing this campaign with the support of AI in choosing bidding strategies, optimizing budgets, selecting audiences, and creating ad templates. When businesses can improve campaign performance to achieve the best number of conversions or conversion values. In addition, this campaign helps businesses attract more new customers on Google channels. The Performance Max campaign helps businesses reach new customer segments on Google channels and networks. At the same time, promote better performance based on their goals.

Increase conversion value

The campaign will be distributed to the right audiences based on channel data to optimize touch points to help customers take the conversion action and businesses get the most conversions. Google AI can create the best-performing ad mixes between audiences and creatives based on the input data.

Deep insights for easy optimization

You can get detailed and transparent campaign performance reports to see which creatives are impacting performance and can help optimize creatives to increase ROI. Based on this information, you can simplify the campaign management and optimization process. With the detailed information provided by campaign reports, you can better understand changes in performance to make appropriate business strategies at scale.

How to create a Performance Max campaign

With a Performance Max campaign, you can automate bidding strategies, optimize budgets, select audiences, and ad formats, and distribute ads to get more conversions and higher conversion values. After creating a campaign, it may take a while to see the number of impressions on your Google Ads account. Campaigns using automated bidding strategies need time to optimize. Newly created or edited ads will be reviewed within 1-2 days.

Step 1: Create a new Performance Max campaign and choose a goal

To create a campaign, log in to your Google Ads account, select Campaigns, and click the (+) icon to Create a new campaign. Then, choose the appropriate advertising campaign goal including Sales, Leads, Website Visits, etc., or Create a campaign without guidance on goals. After setting up the conversion goal for your campaign, select the campaign type as Performance Max and click Continue. 

If you’re creating a Performance Max campaign with products from Merchant Center, here you’ll need to select your Merchant Center account and the country or feed label where you sell your products (if applicable). Then enter a campaign name and select Continue.

Step 2: Set a Bidding Strategy

In the Bidding section, you choose the appropriate bidding strategy including Conversions and Conversion Value. If you want to adjust the target audience, check the box Bid for new customers only in the Customer Acquisition section. Select Next to move to the Campaign Settings section.

Based on the campaign goal you choose, Google’s AI will help you set the appropriate bid for each auction to optimize the campaign. If you are tracking value along with conversions, you should use the Maximize Conversion Value bid strategy. Otherwise, you should choose the Maximize Conversions bid strategy. 

Step 3: Campaign Settings

On the Campaign Settings page, select the location to target under Locations. Alternatively, you can select Enter another location, enter the name of the location you want to target, then select Target or Exclude. If you want to target specific locations within a location, select Nearby locations.

In the Language drop-down menu, select the language your customers speak, and you can select multiple languages ​​to show your ads to specific groups of customers. For additional location targeting, use the Advanced Search feature. Complete all the settings under Other Settings and click Next.

Here, you can choose auto-generated elements if Google’s AI predicts that your campaign’s performance could be improved. Google’s AI curates text and images from landing pages and displays them in your ads to improve performance.

You can set up an ad schedule with campaign start and end dates and Url settings. Use the ad scheduling feature to determine the days and times your ads will appear.

Page feeds provide a set of Url that will be used to serve ads for your campaign. Performance Max includes automatically generating content to match users.

Step 4: Set up component groups and components

In the Component Group, enter a name for the component group and create it according to the recommended guidelines. If you add products from a Merchant Center account to your campaign, the system will automatically create components using the product data you provide. However, you still need to upload headlines, descriptions, and images to help Google’s AI automatically create and optimize your ad.

After entering a name for your component group, confirm that the Campaign Profile Group helps you select the products that will appear in your campaign ads. If you only want to use a few products, click the pencil icon next to All Products. Then use the Selected Products in your ad. You can also select products by Category, Brand, Item ID, Condition, Product Type, Channel, or Custom Label in the drop-down menu. Then check the products you want to include in your ad and click Save to complete your campaign setup.

As a general rule, the recommended component group size is up to 15 images and 5 logos. If you don’t upload your own videos, use the Google Ads tool with up to 5 videos and choose a format based on where your ad is active. Add up to 5 headlines with up to 30 characters, and 5 headlines with up to 90 characters. One short description of up to 60 characters and up to 4 long descriptions of up to 90 characters.

For the call to action, it should be relevant to the target. Include your business or brand name in the ad text. Add a path for the display URL and choose a different final URL for mobile devices. Enabling the Final URL extension will help Google generate a landing page, title, and description that matches the search results. The promotional component will help make the ad more appealing.

You can create one component group when running a Performance Max campaign and add more components after you set it up. Google’s AI will combine the components into the right format to show the best ad. Adding audience signals helps Google’s AI better understand your audience and how to optimize your campaign.

If you use relevant and engaging content, you can show your ad to the right customers to improve performance. Ad components help expand your ad and attract more people to take action with it. They include locations, additional links, prices, etc.

Step 5: Set a budget

For this campaign, you should set an average daily budget of at least 3 times the CPA or cost/conversion for the selected actions, and be flexible with your budget. Check your account regularly to see how your campaign is performing. On some days, your ads are more likely to bring in traffic, so spend up to 2 times the average daily budget.

Step 6: Test and publish campaign

Before publishing your campaign, you should double-check your settings to ensure everything is ready. Then click Publish to publish your campaign immediately. Your ad will be reviewed for 24 – 48 hours or even longer before it is displayed to your target customers.

Campaign optimization tips Performance Max

Choose a conversion goal

You should choose a conversion goal similar to other campaigns based on your current performance. Setting up a new customer acquisition goal allows you to evaluate and prioritize bidding for new customers while still optimizing for sales from existing customers. Set up accurate conversion measurements to reflect the true value of your conversions. Use conversion value rules to further customize how you optimize for performance.

Choose the right bidding strategy

If you are tracking the value of your conversions, use a value-based bidding strategy. If you consider all conversions to be of equal value, use a Maximize Conversions strategy to get as many conversions as possible within your budget. If you are unsure which ROAS or CPA target is right for your campaign, refer to the goals set for performance-based campaigns.

Always enable generated elements and Final URL Expansion

Automatically generated elements are enabled by default, allowing your campaign to use content from your landing pages to create new text elements for your search ads to reach your customers more effectively. Additionally, you should use Final URL Expansion to find more high-converting search terms based on customer needs and the relevance of the search keyword to the landing page. If you want to exclude websites that you do not want to target, use the Final URL Exclusion feature.

Maximize ad assets

You can create multiple asset groups for each campaign, and each group should be related to the overall theme. Adding multiple versions of assets: text, image, and video is better for reaching users in the right way and promoting your brand in many places. Because the more assets you offer, the more ad formats your campaign can create that appear on more ad inventory.

Taking advantage of the Performance Max campaign’s asset creation capabilities to create new assets including text and images. Once you create an asset, you can choose which assets you want to serve in your campaign. At the same time, you can direct Google’s AI to create more assets similar to the one you just created.

Use additional assets such as site links, callouts, lead forms, and phone calls to make your ad more prominent and provide more information for customers to contact your business.

Guide Google AI with audience and search topic signals

Audience signals are the input data source for campaigns to work quickly and optimize performance faster. So take advantage of it to guide Google’s AI to work effectively. Search topics add data to your Matching Performance Max campaign based on Url and components. Besides, it also helps you find audiences across all Google Ads channels based on customer search behavior. At the same time, direct customers to landing pages defined by the Last Url expansion, page feed, and containing Url settings.

Run A/B Performance tests

You can run two types of tests to measure the effectiveness of adding a Performance Max campaign to an existing campaign mix. Or measure when you switch from a regular Shopping campaign to a Performance Max campaign for online sales with a product feed.

If you want to evaluate campaign performance, look at conversion lag, and check optimization points to improve performance. The Insights page will provide you with factors that have a big impact on performance. Also, check the Daily Insights page for personalized insights.

Contact Google ads experts for advice

To create a successful and different campaign, the person who creates them is very important. Share your goals, the most effective ad copy components, and your most valuable audiences to help Google AI go in the right direction. If you are having difficulty setting up and optimizing the performance of your Google Ads campaign, cooperate with Google Ads experts today. You will be able to quickly get acquainted with new updates and create an effective advertising plan to maximize your budget. In particular, Google Ads experts will help you deploy an effective campaign with the most detailed instructions.

Whether your goal is Sales, Potential Customers, or Website Visits, … Google’s Performance Max campaign helps businesses achieve those goals quickly at the best cost. Through the content shared above, it has provided businesses with useful information to be able to deploy effective Google Ads campaigns.

Frequently Asked Questions