Google offers a lot of channels on which to advertise and settings you can play with to best achieve your campaign goals. But what if you want to coordinate a campaign that’s not limited to one channel, without dealing with tediously applying settings across so many broad approaches? Enter the newly-introduced Performance Max.
What is Performance Max and how is it useful?
Performance Max is a new campaign type from Google that’s based on your identifiable goals for a campaign. It gives you the ability to use all your Google Ads inventory in one. When implemented alongside keyword-based search campaigns, Performance Max helps you reach more users across Google’s channels who are more likely to convert.
The primary benefits come from how Performance Max helps you find more converting customers. You can customize your campaign goals depending on your business’ needs and from there it will reach users across channels like YouTube, Search, Maps, Gmail, and more throughout Google’s system. You enter your own preferences and Performance Max uses Google’s user-intent machine learning to identify customer segments you otherwise wouldn’t have found.
Along with reaching users that would otherwise be beyond your advertising means, you’ll also have access to further insights, too. The asset reporting tool can help you understand which creative decisions such as copy and design are affecting performance and how to get more out of them. Plus Performance Max has other insight tools that can help inform your marketing strategy on a broader scale.
While Performance Max can improve advertising effectiveness and give you deeper insight into your customers and marketing performance, it also just makes your life easier. Its automated optimization tools simplify your campaign management and, through extension, allow you to channel that extra energy and money elsewhere.
Performance Max campaigns help you increase conversions across Google’s full range of advertising channels and inventory. Source: Google Blog
When and how should you use Performance Max?
Performance Max is particularly helpful in a number of circumstances. When you don’t want to limit your campaign to a single channel and want to maximize its performance across Google’s platforms, Performance Max is ideal; similarly, if you just want the ease of one campaign appearing on Google’s many different channels instead of having to create a separate one and then manually coordinate them to work together.
In a related vein, Performance Max’s automation works well when you have specific advertising or conversion goals. In general, it’s great for when you want your campaign to have extra reach that you otherwise wouldn’t get from a keyword-based Search campaign — remember that Performance Max campaigns can run across Google’s entire network including Search, YouTube, Gmail, Display, Discovery, and Maps.
Even though Performance Max has more automated abilities that simplify your role, there’s still plenty of things that you’ll control.
Of course, this includes your budget and bidding strategy, although it should be noted that you won’t do any manual bidding in Performance Max. You’ll also naturally have control over the location and language settings, and the schedule of your ads.
Beyond those, you also have options for advanced URL settings. Google will initially define the URLs to which traffic is being driven, but you can decide if you want to exclude URLs or completely override that feature and manually decide which URLs users should be driven to. You also have control over asset groups and ad extensions and, while Performance Max lets Google show ads automatically to users it deems most likely to convert, you can manually add audiences you want Google to target.
While Performance Max shouldn’t replace all your other campaigns, it can accompany them for an efficient way to reach new, highly-interested users across Google’s different channels. Because of its automated learning and its reach beyond just one channel, it’s highly useful for reaching not just more people, but more people who are more likely to interact positively with your advertising. The end result is a campaign that should see greater reach and more conversions.
