Performance Max offers marketeers an incredible opportunity to gather valuable insights about their target audience. For a quick intro, take a look at our blog ‘7 things digital marketers need to know about Performance Max’. In this blog, we dive into how to find your way around PMax, set it up effectively and get it working like a charm.
What are Performance Max Campaigns?
Performance max campaigns are advertising campaigns offered by Google Ads. They allow advertisers to access their entire Google Ads inventory from a single campaign and drive performance across multiple Google channels such as YouTube, Display, Search, Discover and Maps. Performance max campaigns use machine learning to automatically optimise bids and budgeting. They also mix and match your assets to show the best-performing ads to potential customers.
11 Top Performance Max Tips For Successul Campaigns
1. Commit to your campaigns
You must commit to your campaigns to see results. The learning phase of Performance Max campaigns can take up to six weeks, so be patient. It is also recommended that you commit to a minimum spend of $50 -$100 USD per day or at least three times your cost per acquisition (CPA). This will enable Google to gather more data and produce the best results. Google’s billing system makes sure you are not charged more than 30.4 times your average daily amount.
For example, if your average daily spend is $50 daily for the month, you would not be charged more than $1520 (50 x 30.4 = $1520).
2. Use Insights to feed your campaigns
You can use insights in two ways to feed your campaigns.
Firstly, check your search terms. Take the converting search terms and add them to custom segments within your PMax campaigns. This is the same concept as adding converting search terms into search campaigns – if you’re seeing converting search terms that you haven’t included in your custom segments then utilise them! You can also apply this technique the other way round – check the PMax converting search terms and if there are any stand out ones, add them as keywords to your search campaigns.
Next, check your audiences. Take the top-performing audiences and add them to your asset groups within your PMax campaigns. It works the same as search terms but for audiences. However, use your own judgement – just because an audience is showing good performance doesn’t mean everyone on that audience is in the market for your product!
3. Limit Brand Search campaigns triggering PMax Ads
Search campaigns will be prioritised over Performance Max if a user’s search term exactly matches an exact match keyword. Use this info to stop (or limit) brand searches triggering PMax ads. Make sure you add in all the variations of brand terms you see coming through PMax to your brand campaign as an exact match.
4. Upload a wide range of assets
Performance max campaigns display adverts across multiple channels. Therefore, a wide range of assets is needed to make sure your ads are visually compelling on all platforms. Upload text, images and videos so that you increase the likelihood of capturing various audience segments on YouTube, Display, Search, Discover and more. A wide range of asses also gives more options for Google’s machine learning algorithm to experiment with which leads to better optimisation and higher performance.
5. Use campaign exclusions
Use campaign exclusions, which include product, keyword, location, content, and audience exclusions. This refines your targeting and ensures you reach the most relevant audiences. For example, you may want to set a product exclusion for a product that is out of stock so that you don’t waste money on clicks that don’t convert into sales.
6. Use ad extensions
Google Ad extensions, now known as ‘assets, ’ provide additional information and opportunities for users to engage with your ads. Extensions or assets include site link, callout, location, image, price, promotion, lead form, seller rating extensions, and more! Adding these extensions can support your advert to stand out from the crowd.
7. Test ad schedules
Create multiple ad schedules. Notice – what times of day you are receiving low return on investment? By testing ad schedules you can find the high and low performance patterns and edit the times of day your advert will be shown to optimise performance. This is an extremely useful tip if you have a limited budget.
8. Use audience signals
Give your campaign a solid starting point by feeding it with custom audiences/segments. You can also give it lists of people who have previously engaged with your business. This step can be done during PMax campaign set up, or added in after a campaign is already running. By using your business data, you can set your campaign up to run at its highest level of performance, in a much faster timeframe.
9. Use the customer acquisition feature
The customer acquisition feature allows you to choose whether to show the campaign to only new users, or new and existing customers. This is a useful feature if you want to focus on targeting and driving only new customers to your site.
10. Create a clear bidding strategy
There are multiple bidding strategies you can use for PMax campaigns. These include maximising conversions, maximising conversion value, achieving conversions at a specific average cost, targeting return on investment and enhancing cost-per-click (CPC). Get clear about the results that you want to achieve and then choose a relevant bidding strategy.
11. Fine-tune URL expansions
Make sure you exclude any URL’s that aren’t relevant to your campaign. Final URL expansion is an automatic tool that is turned on when you set up a PMax campaign. In some cases it can support you to get more out of your campaign, as it allows Google to send traffic to relevant URL’s on your website. However, if left selected it can also send potential customers to irrelevant pages on your site. Therefore, we would recommend turning the ‘final expansion URL’ tool off and fine tuning the URL’s in your asset groups, so that potential customers successfully reach the correct pages.
Other Helpful Hints
Amend your location settings
You can now amend your location settings to target only users in (or regularly in) your location rather than people showing an interest in it. Toggling this setting should help cut any spam leads that aren’t useful to you.
Build one campaign per assset for lead gen
You can’t see individual asset group performance unless you have a feed set up – which only applies if you’re e-commerce. That’s no good if you’re lead gen, so we recommend building one campaign per asset group in order to make judgment calls about what’s working best.
Avoid auto-created videos
Google auto-create videos can be poor quality. We recommend that you create them yourselves to make them more compelling. If you can’t source any creative or have very limited video available to you, you should be able to whip up something up using a tool like Canva. This is pretty easy to get up and running, and you can choose from templates, soundtrack and even voiceovers. Such tools will support you to create a decent ad in next to no time, and it’ll certainly beat anything auto-generated.
And finally… give it time!
Be patient. Some campaigns take up to 10 days before any activity really kicks in. It can feel risky, but this is the path Google wants digital marketers to tread. Google Ads accounts for around 79% of searches in the UK, which makes it the place to be to promote your business. As a Google Premier Partner, we have access to the latest features and betas from Google Ads. This allows us precisely optimise your performance max campaigns for your desired outcome, and make them stand out over your competitors.
Need an agency to keep you ahead of the curve and get the most out of your performance marketing? Get in touch with us today!
