The Performance Max Campaign is the latest entry in the Google Ads network. Performance Max Campaign is the next step towards automation by Google Ads, and it combines all ad networks provided by the Google ads network.
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.
Main Function of Performance Max Campaign by Google
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; 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.
Benefits of Performance Max
- Reach new audiences across all ad networks & show your ads to more potential prospects.
- Performance Max works on smart bidding strategies & helps you drive better results & performance.
- Steer automation with the Performance Max. Even non-experts & novices can launch this campaign & automation helps to manage it. Also, it simplifies campaign management and easily optimizes your ads.
- And last but not least transparent insights into what is working & what should be improved.
When to use it?
Performance Max is the best option to use when:
- You have specific advertising and conversion goals (e.g., driving online sales, lead – generation, etc.).
- You want to maximize the performance of your campaign and aren’t limited by which channel your ads appear on.
- You want to easily access all of Google’s advertising channels using a single campaign.
- You want to get additional reach and conversion value beyond keyword-based search campaigns.
Google Ads Automation
Google Ads automation uses machine learning to grow your business. You add your unique expertise, such as budget, business goals, and conversions you want to measure, and Google Ads automation will find potential customers for your goals and serve the most appropriate ad, with the optimal bid, to maximize campaign performance.
Smart Bidding combined with attribution technology helps determine the best options for your campaign across all Google inventory and determine bids on the auctions that have the highest probability of meeting your business goals in real-time. Our machine learning is enhanced when you add audience signals to your Performance Max campaign.
Campaign Inputs
Performance Max uses machine learning models to optimize bids and placements to drive conversions or conversion value for your goals. Still, you provide important inputs like audience signals (including your customer data) and high-quality text, images, and video that can significantly improve your campaign performance. You can also provide important inputs about what types of conversions are most valuable to your business by applying conversion values and setting value rules. Account-level brand safety settings are also available to tell Google Ads about the types of content where you don’t want your ads to appear.
Problems With Performance Max
Although Performance Max has several benefits for beginners & novices, easy to use & set up, it doesn’t require much expertise for optimizations & automation.
However, only someone who has rich experience in handling Google Ads & is knowledgeable about it inside out can differentiate between its benefits & downsides.
What are the Issues?
- New & Learning: Whoever knows about Google or any other market giant’s new features knows that these new tools come with great risk. It can be said that Google is testing their newly launched tool with our money, which can go either way as it’s still in testing (Beta)
- The Google Ads expert community has observed that this new campaign is good for saying that it can be easily handled by some who don’t have much experience with managing Google Ads. However, only experts can tell that it has its downsides.
- The problems are that Performance Max only runs on smart bidding strategies & because of it, if your account doesn’t have much data, i.e., past conversions, it can go downhill with burning your money without any results.
- It affects other campaigns running on smart bidding strategies & doesn’t provide much control at the product or ad level.
- After launching Performance Max campaigns as a test, it has been observed that it affected other smart shopping or search campaigns that we provided good results before.
- Performance Max is like a pandora’s box; it can provide great results if used correctly or burn your money without any results.
Pro-Tip
To avoid the above-stated issues, always test Performance Max with a particular category/collection. So, it would not affect the performance of other campaigns seen and discussed many times among the media buying community.
The Future
If you are not a fan of the Performance Max campaign due to conflicts & other issues, then it can’t be helped. It is here to stay. By Q3 of 2022, Google announced that the smart shopping campaigns, which are the favourite of all, would be replaced by Performance Max Campaigns.
Yes, hard blow. However, one needs to work with what options are available. So, only testing & improving over time can be a solution. It doesn’t mean that Performance Max is bad, but it could be improved over time. Even for some, the Performance Max campaigns have done wonders, so we just have to wait and see how it unfolds.
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