Performance Max is an automated goal-based campaign type that uses machine learning to serve audiences a relevant ad with an optimal bid to maximize campaign performance.
An advertiser selects a marketing objective and then chooses the conversion goals that support the objective. To ensure that your campaigns are optimized to drive the best ROI through automation, assign more than one goal and different values to conversion to a single campaign. With a focus on goals, Performance Max campaigns use automated bidding and targeting technology to help you invest your budget more efficiently to spend where the highest-ROI opportunities are.
Google explains their new Performance Max ads like this:
“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. It’s designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.
Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding.
Performance Max combines Google’s automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. They’re all empowered by your specific advertising objective (for example, if you have a CPA or ROAS target) and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds you provide.”
Budget
This new ad type is a fantastic new addition to jewelers looking to harness the latest ecommerce technologies. However, from what I’ve seen, it’s a waste to try Performance Max unless you’re prepared to spend at least $50-100 per day for at least a month – without it, it’s unlikely you’ll generate enough data and learning for the format to work properly.
Lot’s Of Creative Assets
One of the trickiest parts of setting up a Performance Max campaign isn’t the bid strategy or the audience signal, it’s providing enough assets for this creative-hungry format. Since the campaign covers so many different types of inventory, you’ll need to feed it lots of text, image and video assets.
If you’ve ever set up a Display campaign, then you know that including video assets there is optional. In Performance Max, it is not optional. Or rather, if you don’t provide any video assets, then Google Ads will create them for you (which usually comes out bad).
Has your company tried Google “PMax” ads yet?