Google Performance Max Guide

1. Google Performance Max Guide lira.agency

2. What is a Performance Max Campaign? It is a goal-based automated ad campaign in Google Ads. It allows advertisers to access all their Google Ads networks in a single place. The Performance Max campaign is available on YouTube, DGN, Search, Google Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Source: blog.google lira.agency

3. How to Launch a Performance Max Campaign? You’ll need: 1. A link to your website. 2. Content for creating ads. The campaign will: 1. Analyze the pages of your website and determine which audience, for which queries, and on what sites to run the advertising campaign, 2. Create ads from your content for different sites and platforms. lira.agency

4. Structurally, the campaign has Assets inside and it is similar to the group structure in other types of campaigns. At the Asset level, you can separate ads — test different ad content, run special offers and USPs. Source: Google Ads YouTube lira.agency

5. What Is Important to Pay Attention to When Setting Up a Performance Max Campaign? 1. Select the goals you want your campaign to be optimized for correctly. ● If your account does not have target tracking set up yet, then it’s not the right time for you to set up your PM campaign yet. You can read our article on why it’s important to track conversions. ● If your conversions are tracked correctly, measure the number of conversions. The more conversions you have accumulated in your account, the more chances you have to successfully teach your Performance Max campaign. ● If the number of your conversions is not high enough, we recommend setting up additional micro-conversions and including them in your PM campaign optimization. Micro-conversions can contain actions on the website that is close to the goal conversion. For an online store, adding items to the shopping cart, or viewing a certain number of products or pages may be considered micro-conversions. lira.agency

6. What Is Important to Pay Attention to When Setting Up a Performance Max Campaign? 2. Tick the box if you want to show your ads to the new users only. lira.agency

7. What Is Important to Pay Attention to When Setting Up a Performance Max Campaign? 3. Set a budget limit. Otherwise, you risk spending a lot in the learning phase of the campaign. But at the same time, don’t underestimate the budget. The ad campaign won’t have enough data to learn, and you won’t get results. If you know the cost of conversions, target a budget of at least 5xCPA per day. 4. Make sure the geotargeting settings have the correct country/city, etc. Also, select the ads to be shown to people located or regularly visiting your target location. Because by default, Google uses the presence of interest: it shows ads not only to those who live in the target location but also to people from other locations, who are actively interested. If this setting does not fit your business — don’t use it. lira.agency

8. What Is Important to Pay Attention to When Setting Up a Performance Max Campaign? 5. We highly recommend that you don’t run a PM campaign on every page of your website without limits. Some pages often do not make sense to use in advertising. We recommend enabling the URL in the expansion section, and also setting an exclusion rule for the pages it doesn’t make sense to train the campaign on. lira.agency

9. What Is Important to Pay Attention to when Creating an Asset? Creating Ads Audience Signals These are additional markers that you use as a compass to tell the campaign which audiences you think the ads will be relevant for. It is very important to use this tool in your Performance Max campaigns. You can use your different audiences. Here’s what you need to create ads: ● Headline: 3—5 headlines, ● Long headline: 1—5 long headlines, ● Description: 2—5 descriptions, ● Images: at least 1 square and 1 landscape image, ● Logo: at least 1 square logo, more are optional, It’s also good practice to divide assets by audience meaning, for example, one for conversion audiences, one for the special custom audiences, one for social demographic audiences, etc. This will give you an additional opportunity to analyze the quality of the campaign and its elements. ● YouTube video: not required, up to 5 videos of min 10 seconds each. If you don’t have the resources to prepare video content, at least try to make it using special services (for example, Offeo). When preparing your ad campaigns, pay attention to the Ad Strength Indicator. It is important to create your ads with the value of this indicator not less than Average. lira.agency

10. The Pros & Cons of the Performance Max Campaign Pros Cons ● The campaign is fully automated and will save you time as a professional or a business owner. Evaluating campaign effectiveness is the most troublesome area. It’s not about evaluating the effectiveness of an entire campaign, but about ● The campaign can produce results, provided some basic conditions are met. understanding which sites, ads, keywords, and audience signals bring you a converting audience. All the current PM campaign reports are A PM campaign will get you access to all of Google’s sites within a single advertising campaign. Running one campaign on all sites at once will save you energy and resources. ● summarized at the level of impressions. But you’ll never know which particular ad brought you all the conversions. lira.agency

11. This is what the search terms report looks like. lira.agency

12. This is what the audience report looks like. lira.agency

13. You can find the site report in the Reports section of the Campaigns page. lira.agency

14. Unfortunately, you can’t see any stats besides the number of impressions in the Placement report. lira.agency

15. As you can see, the report has a separate summary section for the websites owned by Google, and for the websites from the Google Display Network. You can’t get more details. With the reporting problems for PM campaigns comes another problem — lack of control. If you want to build your Google campaigns as accurately and clearly as possible — an PM campaign will not allow you to do so. Consider this when you decide whether to run an PM campaign or not. lira.agency

16. Resources You’ll need these three elements to successfully train a campaign: ● Conversions. Before launching a PM campaign, conversion tracking must be set up correctly. The number of conversions should be sufficient to train the campaign. ● Enough budget. You will need money for the launch.It doesn’t make sense to run a PM campaign with a severely limited budget. ● Time. Campaigns need time to test different targeting audiences and find the audience that converts. The more data goes through the campaign regularly, the faster this will happen. Google itself recommends testing a campaign for at least 6 weeks before deciding on its effectiveness. lira.agency

17. Traffic cannibalization Traffic cannibalization is when one campaign steals traffic from another. Logically we assume that an automated campaign would simply deprive of traffic the ordinary search and GDN campaigns running on the same audience. But as our colleagues at Google assure us, this does not happen with PM campaigns. So you shouldn’t stop your other campaigns when you launch a PM campaign. A PM campaign can nicely complement your already running campaigns without cannibalizing them. lira.agency

18. How Do You Know if the Performance Max Campaign Is Right for You? ECommerce. A PM campaign shows much better results when you track conversions across the entire sales funnel. The typical funnel for eCommerce usually consists of: ● ● ● ● Visiting a website, Viewing a product card, Adding items to the shopping cart, Buying a product. Often it is logical to set up tracking each of these steps as a goal for eCommerce products right away. Lead generation businesses. Building a tracking funnel is effective too. Analyze the mandatory steps on the site users should take, and build this sequence of interaction with users. You’ll need to track and set each action in the funnel as a conversion and as a goal. Such a funnel will allow you to put your PM campaign into an auto-strategy mode based on values. If you set a value for each goal in the funnel, you will be able to choose which conversions you need more and which less at the strategy level. For lead generation, the value can be calculated based on CPA and conversions; for eCommerce, it is often transferred automatically. You will be able to set the campaign objective: this or that action is the most valuable to me, let’s focus on it. The thing is, for all other auto-strategies, all conversions are equal. They don’t care which conversions lead to purchase (and are the most important to you) and which ones are just steps on the way to the main goal. When you set the value to conversions and switch the campaign to an auto-strategy mode by value — you’re telling the campaign which conversions are the most important. lira.agency

19. Performance Max Campaign VS Smart Shopping Campaign Smart Shopping, as well as PM campaigns are good and effective if you have enough products, traffic, and budget. So for those advertisers who have already been actively and successfully using Smart Shopping Campaigns, expanding to PM will not be very difficult. These advertisers will get even more reach through additional Discovery & Maps sites within the PM campaign. Performance Max will replace Google Smart Shopping and Local campaigns. lira.agency

20. The PM campaign is the future in terms of automation. More and more of the routine work is being taken over by Google automation. If you have questions about Performance Max or whether automation is right for your digital marketing efforts, don’t hesitate to contact our team. hello@lira.agency lira.agency