Performance Max is the newest goal-focused campaign type that allows advertisers to access all the Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. Using Smart Bidding to optimize performance in real-time and across channels, Performance Max enables you to drive performance based on your defined conversion goals, resulting in more conversions and value.

However, many factors lead to low performance of your campaign, resulting in more down conversion and poor results. In this article, we’ll outline different reasons why your Performance Max campaign fluctuates and changes over time and how you can utilize your Google Ads account’s features to figure out what’s causing these changes.

Evaluate Campaign Performance Based On Your Bidding Strategy

Before drawing any conclusions about the campaign’s performance, assessing whether the parameters you use match the metrics your campaign is optimizing for is crucial. When examining campaign performance to determine what caused swings, updating your campaign’s bid strategy or optimizing target settings to match your company and advertising goals will help guarantee that you are focusing on the pertinent data.

Common Reasons Why Your Performance Is Inconsistent

1. Current Changes To Campaign Setting Or Account

Your performance can be altered by changing any account or campaign options, including bid strategy, budget, conversion goals, audiences, geography, language, and ad timing.

2. Conversion Delay & Conversion Tracking Setup

As Google Ads optimizes toward your chosen conversion action, serving and spending may decrease if there is a rapid decline or rise in global pings or tag fires for a conversion action your campaign is employing for Auto bidding.

3. Bids & Bid Targets

If you set your bids, bid limits, or bid objectives without considering the past data Google Ads will use to display your ads; your performance can fluctuate.

4. Budget Settings

Performance fluctuations may occur more frequently when your campaign’s funding is constrained.

5. Creative Coverage & Diversity

Make sure you have a varied selection of creatives for your Performance Max campaign that can be automatically merged into several ad formats that can serve across all surfaces.

6. Targeting Settings & Overlaps (Location, Language)

Your campaign may be more susceptible to performance fluctuations if directed at a smaller group of consumers with highly particular geography or language preferences. Due to comparable keywords or other targeting, your account may have many campaigns, or ad groups qualified to participate in overlapping auctions.

7. Policy & Ad Review Status

Your assets or asset group will be re-submitted for policy review each time you add or modify them. All Google Ads guidelines must be followed by Performance Max campaigns.

8. Other Account Issues

The performance of your account and, consequently, the performance of your campaigns can be affected by problems with payments, billing transfers, or other account-level problems.

9. Auction Dynamics

The decisions made by other marketers who are taking part in the same auctions as you can have an impact on the effectiveness of your campaign.

Google Ad Performance Max Campaigns are designed to help you control your ad spending and get more qualified traffic to your site. It’s important to understand when the ads are running correctly and when they’re not. If they’re not running, turn them off immediately.

Google AdWords is not just a tool for placing ads. Advertisers want to find out how their ads and campaigns are performing, as we live in an era where hundreds of ads appear daily on multiple apps and websites. Using Google Analytics is your best option to track the campaigns’ performance. Another problem that might arise with the Performance Max Campaign is low-traffic.

The Google ad Performance Max Campaign tool helps you learn which keywords contribute to most of the traffic to your site and improve your organic rankings based on those keywords. The tool guides how to manage the campaign effectively and which keywords impact your earnings the most. This, in turn, will help you optimize your ad text, budgets, and placement criteria to achieve the highest possible quality score from Google.

Is your Google ad campaign showing error messages like “Your Ad Group is missing transitions” or “Your ads are not being seen because performance max prevents them from appearing in your placements?” If yes! You can solve the issue by increasing your campaign’s daily budget.

The effectiveness of Google ad campaigns is optimized using the Google advertising performance manager (APM). Many collections can be adjusted within the APM, but one of the most crucial ones you should be familiar with is “cost per click,” which shows your daily budget for individual paid search ad spends. If your Google ads Performance Max Campaign is running slow and not performing as expected. There could be any reason for this; you are not targeting the right keywords, not creating powerful ads, or scheduling ads at the wrong time.

When your Google ads Performance Max Campaign is not running as expected, it could mean that either the ad group or an individual ad within a group is set to exclude visits from certain countries. To resolve this issue, review your list of excluded countries and adjust accordingly, or run a campaign against the excluded ones. If you want to exclude all of them, remove them from the list before setting up your test.

Google Ads Performance Max is a campaign feature available in Google AdWords, Google display network, and the DoubleClick bid manager that targets keywords above your pay-per-click bid. This allows you to be more selective about keywords across paid search, display campaigns and remarketing.

A campaign that allows performance advertisers to access all of their inventory from a single campaign. It helps us to show ads like Youtube ads, Discovery ads, Gmail ads, Search ads, display dynamic image ads, display dynamic native ads, display text ads, and discover ads. This campaign makes auto videos & starts showing ads wherever video ads are needed.

In this, you can also add the audience, which helps the client to get more conversions & more relevant audience for his product. 

If your campaign is not performing as expected, there could be any of the reasons:

• Issue in Ads
• Bidding 
• Targeting
• Conversion Tracking
• Campaign Settings

This article can help you troubleshoot your campaign in the following situations:

1. The Campaign Is Not Live

Make sure your campaign is launched, and check if it is live.

• Click campaign, then find your Performance Max Campaign.
• Check that the status is ‘Eligible’. If it is ‘Paused’, use the pause icon and select ‘Enable’.
• Check if your campaign has started again.

2. Automation Is Evaluating Data

Performance Max Campaign is powered by a machine-learning model. They have crawlers behind the campaigns. After setting up the data, it will take 1-2 weeks to optimize the campaigns. If there is a low performance showing in campaigns, then it will show that it is still in learning mode.

If the same thing is showing after two weeks, you must contact support to check further.

3. Asset Groups Are Under Review (Policy Issues):

After you make the ads in the asset group, it will undergo a review to ensure that all ads that you made are aligned with Google Ad policies. If your ads or assets are not aligned, they will be restricted from serving on some networks, affecting your performance. If your ads are under review for over two business days, you must talk to Google support for the same or Appeal for those restricted ads. 

Hover over the status if it says “Disapproved” or “Approved (Limited)” to learn about particular policy concerns. If you know the violation, click “Edit Assets” to fix it.

If you think your ads are wrongly disapproved, you can also appeal for the same. When hovering over that particular ad that is having an issue, you can see an appeal option given. Click Appeal, and select the reason you believe it was improperly rejected.

Every time you make changes in assets, they will undergo the review process again before it can start running the ads.

4. Restrictive Location Targeting

If your location targeting for your particular campaign is restrictive (for example, if you aim for a 2-mile radius around a specific zip code.), it may not work. For this, you must widen your target location to check that it will allow your campaign to perform.

5. Budget Too Low

Make sure when you set up the campaign, your budget should not be less than other performing campaigns. If your budget is low compared to your typical Avg.CPC, you may see slower growth in your campaign.

6. Users Receive Ads From The Campaign, Outside The Intended Locations

There are two types of location targeting & exclusions in Pmax campaigns.

• Presence: In this, you have to target location & exclusions based on the user’s current location.
• Interest: In this, you have to target location & exclusions based on a location that the user has expressed interest in.

Example: 

If a campaign targets users in India based on Presence, it will show ads only to people located in India. If a campaign targets users in India based on Presence or Interest, it will show ads to both users located in India & those who have expressed their interest in India.

Listing Group Setup Guidance

When setting up asset groups for your retail Performance Max Campaign, you shouldn’t have an overlap in products you are targeting between asset groups because they start competing with each other. Therefore, keep this in mind if you target products from A to J in one asset group, you should also target products from K to Z in another asset group.

Performance Max is the latest goal-based campaign type designed to complement the former keyword-based search campaigns that allow you to access all Google ads inventory from a single campaign. Performance Max helps you find more converting channels like Youtube, display, search, discover, Gmail, and maps.

Google ads streamline reporting for performance-based reasons. However, there are a few things with Performance Max campaigns that should be taken into account when using Google Analytics products.

Things To Consider:

• All Google Analytics and Ads considerations are also applied to Performance Max; after all, it is still a Google ad campaign.
• Performance Max campaign reports work as intended within the campaign’s tab. When combined with the Campaign, Campaign ID, or Campaign ID dimensions, Performance Max campaign data may be spread across numerous rows. It is suggested to use the ‘campaigns’ tab in such situations.
• Stats may appear erroneously when using filters (reports, views, or a mix of both) incompatible with Performance Max campaigns, such as Ad group, Campaign terms, and Campaign content. Before reading the Performance Max campaign’s report, it is best to remove those filters.
• Contrary to Google Analytics’ normal behavior, Performance Max tracks conversions that result from Engaged-view conversions. 

What Are Engaged-View Conversions?

It specializes in video advertising ( on Youtube & the google display network) and the specific user behavior that arises from watching videos as opposed to other kinds of advertisements. People rarely take action right after watching an ad on YouTube; instead, they frequently act after finishing their entire viewing session. That is where the Engaged-view conversions concept comes into play.

When you watch at least 10 seconds of a skippable in-stream ad (or the entire ad if it is less than 10 seconds) and convert within the engaged-view conversion window, the conversion is then considered an engaged view.

Benefits Of Engages-View Conversion:

• A more precise technique to gauge the effectiveness of direct response video commercials.
• A stronger signal of user engagement.

What Types Of Campaigns Track Engaged-View Conversions?

• App Campaigns
• Display Campaigns
• Video Campaigns

Engaged-View Conversions For Display Ads:

With millions of websites and applications featuring your visual ads thanks to display campaigns, these advertisements are a robust sales and marketing tool.

Since engaged-view conversions are a more reliable non-click conversion metric, you can use them in your display campaigns with video assets.

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a potent and essential platform for digital marketing. It is the most widely used website analytics service worldwide, with over 40 million users. Even with all of the power of Google’s analytics engine, it can be a little challenging to comprehend exactly how it can be used to improve the visibility and effectiveness of your business. The analytics are used for tracking but don’t provide a comprehensive picture of everything. Therefore, we are switching to GA4 to understand the reporting objective better. GA 4 has more things in depth, according to Universal Analytics.

There are many factors that can affect your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. What you need is a partner like ROI Minds to help you with your digital efforts! With more than 5 years of experience in the market, we are confident that we have the capabilities to handle your next project. As a matter of fact, our team has been recently recognized for our invaluable services and solutions by The Manifest! 

We’ve been named one of the PPC agencies in Melbourne with the most reviews! This is an incredible award, and we are delighted to share this with all of you. Our team is over the moon, and we are ecstatic to celebrate this with all of the people who helped us in achieving this award.

Before that, what is The Manifest? The Manifest is a business news and how-to website that compiles and analyzes practical business wisdom for innovators, entrepreneurs, and small and mid-market businesses. You can browse through company rankings and projects to help find the best partner for your business. 

We would like to thank our clients for their overwhelming support! You guys are the reason why we are able to win these awards and accolades in the market. To The Manifest team, thank you so much for recognizing our efforts and dedication in the market. We are grateful for all that you’ve done for the B2B industry.

Lastly, we would like to thank our team for their burning passion and dedication to helping our clients. Your commitment to our craft is undoubtedly the best in the market today! Let’s start your digital marketing journey together! Connect with our team today and tell us more about your business.

The customer acquisition goal is introduced in Performance Max Campaigns by Google. The prime focus of customer acquisition is to optimize the campaigns and bids to acquire new clients. You can either optimize the campaigns to bid higher or bid exclusively for new customers.

Goals Around Customer Acquisition

1. Bid higher for new customers over the old ones. This approach helps you increase revenue and gives you the advantage of an enhanced and stronger customer base.
2. Bid only for new customers. This goal is not directly focused on revenue. Instead, it focuses on bringing in new customers for business, so it is recommended more for lead generation than eCommerce. Additionally, this will help you to increase your market share.

You can choose either of the two options mentioned above based on your actual business goals.

Here Are A Few Scenarios

• If your products are low price products and your maximum business comes from retaining customers, you should only bid for new customers. This will help you increase your market share and also lead generation business.
• If you want to maintain your ROAS (return on ad spend) and are also trying to get new customers, you should focus on bidding higher for new customers.

Instructions To Implement Customer Acquisition Goal

1. Setup Customer Acquisition:- First, you need to go to the conversion section and add details in the customer acquisition section.

Details to be added are:

• You need to provide the list of your existing customers, which will help Google to identify your customers with up-to-date data.
• You need to assign a value to customer acquisition, like telling Google how much a conversion is worth for you. It depends on business to business, so you need to add accordingly.

2. Enable new customer acquisition goals in your Google ads campaign

• Go to campaign settings.
• Click on the “Customer acquisition” row.
• Enable the ‘optimize campaign’ for acquiring new customers.
• After that, you will get those two goals, and you can select which one suits your business needs.

How Can We Monitor The Performance Of Customer Acquisition Goals?

There are two columns that you need to add to your campaign KPI to monitor the performance:

• New Customers: This will show you the number of new customers acquired by the campaign.
• New Customers Lifetime Value: This will show the amount corresponding to the number of new customers we got to the value we assigned.

For example:- If you got six conversions and the value assigned to a new customers acquisition is $30 then the lifetime value will be $180

We can see conversions in 3 categories by segmenting.

• New:- Customers who have purchased products from your website or app for the first time and haven’t made any purchases in the last 540 days. Secondly, they are not added to the customers’ list that we have uploaded.
• Returning:- Customers who have purchased products from our website and also fall under the list of customers who have purchased in the last 540 days.
• Unknown:- These are the customers who were unable to track for various reasons.

How Can We Distinguish New Customers From Old Ones?

There are three ways we can help Google to locate new customers for our business.

Google Detected: If our conversion tracking is set up correctly, then Google automatically creates the customer list based on 540 days of campaign activity. This is the easiest way to distinguish between new and old customers, but there is one problem: users often delete cookies. So this can not be a fully accurate method.

Uploaded Audience List: In this method, you provide your existing customers’ data to Google by uploading the customer list. If you keep this list up-to-date, then this will be the best option to identify new customers.

New Customer Conversion Tracking Using Tags (add-ons): We can set up conversion tracking with tagging. This method requires a bit more setup from our end, but it will give us more control over the conversions.

Note: Make sure that your uploaded customer list is shared with all the campaigns.

Instructions To Set Up Customer Acquisition Tracking Codes:-

Step 1:- Install the global site tag conversion tracking code on the website.

If you don’t know how to install it, kindly refer to the link mentioned below:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6095821

Step 2:- Add the new_customer parameter to your tag event snippet.

Here is the example mentioned below:-

<script type=”text/javascript”>

gtag(‘event’, ‘purchase’, {

“send_to”: “AW-CONVERSION_ID/CONVERSION_LABEL”, /* PLEASE REPLACE WITH YOUR VALUE */

…

“new_customer”: true, /* calculate dynamically, populate with true/false */

…

]

});

/* ]]> */

Google Ads play a significant role in selling. It is a top-notch platform to accomplish our business goals. We tend to specialize in our USP product to focus on new customers with the assistance of Google ads algorithmic rule. We’ve got an associate in nursing choice to optimize bids in the budget which will facilitate North American nations to focus on new customers and provide better ROAS (return on ad spend).

With the assistance of Performance Georgia home boy, we’ll acquire new customers because:

• We are going to grow business revenue but will optimize conversion to new customers which can give semi-permanent revenue for our business.
• We’ll increase market share with a committed take into account client accretion.

We offer two modes for customers acquisition that will facilitate to grab the goal:

• Will bid higher for new customers than the existing ones. It’ll add a lot of new client acquisition prices for a customer’s initial purchase conversion price. We’ll use counseled mode, as a result, it helps to maximize the revenue across all customers.
• Will use new client bids that square measure used just for new customers. We will square measure going to run restricted ads which will target customers who are unaccustomed to our business and can counsel this selection only if we’ve committed to acquisition-focused budgets.

Advantages Of Performance Georgia Home Boy Campaign:

• Highly shared with new customers. It’ll facilitate our business and supply semi-permanent revenue.
• Efficient budget utilization for brand-new customer acquisition can facilitate lower acquisition prices.

Customer Acquisition Price:

The customer acquisition price is the price adjustment to be supplementary to a replacement customer’s initial purchase conversion. Our recommendation is to line the client acquisition price and the new client’s typical initial purchase price that represents the revenue that a new customer would bring over their lifespan. After you opt for a price-based bid strategy, you’ll use this total price as the basis to line your ROAS targets. The client acquisition price is just utilized by campaigns that use price-based mostly bidding ways.

You can define the goods you wish to be served up in your Performance Max Campaign, which is advertised inside your campaign’s asset group. Listings comprised both products and collections, makeup listing groupings (groups of products, assets, and rich retail data representing a category landing page on your website).

How To Use Listing Groups?

Listing groups categorize your listings according to the qualities the merchant center has given them. They control the listing part of your campaigns, and a campaign’s asset group includes listing groupings.

Use Listing Groups For Bidding & Reporting

Bidding is automated for Performance Max Campaigns. The advertising objective you choose for your campaign will be used to establish bids. 

Reporting metrics for Performance Max Campaigns for the “listing groups tab” and the “campaign tab” may differ. The listing group’s tab can only report on data at the product level, which is why each product receives an impression. For instance, an ad displays several products in a single ad space. Nevertheless, the campaign expands final URLs when using listing groups. 

Ads may be served to a URL supplied in the campaign (Final URL) or to a product included in the campaign via the associated Google merchant center for Performance Max Campaigns with a merchant center feed.

Ads may be served to extra URLs on the final URL domain specified, in addition to product URLs from the GMC included in listing groups for the Performance Max Campaign, if final URL expansion is enabled.

Ads will only be provided to the final URL in addition to product URLs from the GMC that are included in listing groups for the Performance Max Campaign if the final URL Expansion is disabled.

Attributes can be used to list group subdivisions. You can include these attributes in your product data in the merchant center to define listing groups.

An attribute based on the Google product taxonomy is called a category. {Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Dresses} is an example of a category string. The “>” character in your product data defines the hierarchy levels in the category, which you can use to divide listing groupings further. We may assign you a category if you don’t submit one. After submitting it, Google may decide to hone the category further. Despite the best efforts, some products might be misclassified. Try to become familiar with the Google product category.

Performance Max was first introduced in late 2020 and marketed as “a new method of purchasing Google ads.” After a year of beta testing, Performance Max was made available to everyone in 2021 after months of anticipation.

Now that Performance Max has been used, we can examine how it performs. Does it deliver as promised greater automation, richer analytics, and improved campaign effectiveness for Google Ads?

While some praise Performance Max campaigns’ ability to use machine learning to achieve outstanding outcomes, critics point out some of its drawbacks, including the loss of control that comes with automated bidding and the restricted access to campaign and ad information.

What Exactly Is Performance Max?

As the name suggests, Performance Max is a brand-new goal-based campaign type dedicated to maximizing Performance. It focuses on improving the effectiveness of Google ads campaigns to boost conversions.

Consider Performance Max your all-access commercial card to the Google Network, which covers well-known services like Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Shopping.

Performance Max promises to deliver deeper insights for data geeks with machine learning and improved reporting capabilities in addition to a new, automated approach to buying advertisements across all of Google’s channels from a single campaign.

Even if it all sounds fantastic, Performance Max isn’t flawless. You need to test it for a while because it may take 6 to 8 weeks before users notice reliable performance.

When to Apply Campaigns for Google Performance Max?

Use Performance Max, advises Google, when:

• You have specific advertising and conversion objectives; we advise defining smart goals to get the most out of them.
• Your advertisements aren’t constrained to one channel; Performance Max shouldn’t be used if your advertising has limitations or constraints or was created for a specific channel. It works well for campaigns that permit real-time adaptation flexibility.
• You wish to run a single campaign across all of Google’s media advertising; as previously said, everything is included.
• You wish to expand the scope of your keyword-based search campaigns. You may reach an even more audience with Performance Max, which will increase conversions.

How to Find and Create Placement Reports?

To locate a pre-existing placement report, follow the instructions below. 

• Log in to your Google ads account.
• Select ‘report’ from the dashboard option on the page menu.
• Select ‘predefined reports’ from the drop-down menu.
• Click ‘other.’
• Click ‘Performance Max Campaign placement.’
• You can add filters to your report by selecting the filter icon and filter types.
• To Download a report, choose a file type and click “Download.”

To create a customized placement report, follow these steps.

• Log in to your Google ads account.
• Select ‘Report’ from the dashboard’s drop-down menu on the page, and then click ‘Report.’
• Click ‘Table’ after selecting the +sign next to ‘Custom.’
• Select ‘Performance Max placement’ from the “Attributes” section, or type “Performance Max placement” into the search field (“Performance Max placement” may be found under “Row.”).
• Choose ‘Impr.’ under the “Performance” section or type “Impr.” into the search box (The word “Impr.” can be seen in the word “Column.”
• By choosing the ‘filter icon’ and the filter types, you can add filters to your report.
• To download the report, choose a file type and click ‘Download.’

Important Characteristics of Performance Max Campaigns

1. Getting New Clients

Performance Max customer acquisition now offers a new conversion setting type. This was a well-liked element in smart shopping campaigns, and its inclusion only expanded its functionalities.

By increasing your bids for them or tailoring your campaigns to target them, this aim enables you to concentrate on attracting new clients while also making it simpler to recognize them thanks to Customer Match lists, conversion tags, and auto-detection.

This setting prevents your current customers from seeing the adverts, even if it may decrease traffic and raise the cost per lead (or reduces if you selected the lower bid option). Check a box and confirm your audience list of clients to complete the quick setup process.

2. Audience Responses

You can recommend audiences to Google’s machine learning algorithms to boost conversions using a new audience signals tool exclusive to the Performance Max Campaign.

We cannot overstate how crucial audience signals are for directing the machine learning algorithms toward audiences most likely to convert. Even though using them in your Performance Max campaigns is optional.

Performance Max will display your adverts to a sizable, irrelevant audience if the audience lists are poor or overly broad.

Google Performance Max Campaigns’ Advantages

• Access to the entire Google Network will help your keyword search campaigns advance since deep learning will show the right adverts to the right people at the right time.
• Performance Max will create advertising based on the creative materials you supply. Smart bidding automates every step of the bidding and ad-buying process.
• To increase efficiency and cut down on time, use audience cues to direct machine learning algorithms in the right direction.
• Contains fresh elements, including asset Audience Insights and diagnostic insights.
• Such Campaigns are goal-focused and assist you in reaching your marketing objectives effortlessly.
• In other words, Google Performance Max Campaigns are designed to make Google ad campaigns simpler to set up, expose ads to a larger audience, and optimize performance in real-time.

This article will show you how to build an asset group in Performance Max. An asset group is a collection of assets that you manage. You can use asset groups to control the order in which assets are loaded and set options for multiple assets simultaneously.

Types Of Assets & Adding Them To Performance Max

Now that your Performance Max account is set up, it’s time to start adding assets. This is where you’ll add all the individual content you want to monitor.

To add an asset, click on the “Add Asset” button in the upper right corner of the screen. This will bring up a pop-up window where you can select the type of asset you want to add.

Four different types of assets you can track:

1. Pages – To add a page as an asset, you must provide the URL of the page.
2. Videos –  To add a video as an asset, you must provide the URL of that video. 
3. Images – You can track any image you want. To add an image as an asset, you must provide its URL.
4. Files – To add a file as an asset, you must provide the URL of that particular file. You can track any file you want.

How Asset Groups Collect Audience Signals Data?

As you know, audience signals are crucial to measuring the success of the Performance Max Campaign. This data can help you determine whether your campaigns are reaching the right people and whether your content is engaging. There are different ways to collect audience signals data, but the most effective one is through the asset groups. Asset groups allow you to track how different content performs for different audiences.

To create an asset group, start by segmenting your audience into smaller groups based on demographics, interests, or behavior. Then, create content specifically tailored to each group. For example, you can create a blog post targeting new customers and design a video for people who have already shown interest in your product.

Once you’ve created your content, add it to an asset group and start tracking its Performance by counting how many people have seen it. For how long they were on the page and what response it gets from the users. This data will help you fine-tune your content strategy and deliver the right message to the right people.

As already mentioned, both an ad group and an asset group serve the same purpose (organizing ads into categories inside a campaign).

The “creatives” that are packaged together in a single group to make an asset group includes pictures, videos, headlines, lengthy headlines, and descriptions. You may have more control and transparency over the Performance of your campaigns if you employ asset groups correctly and use specific audience signals. Doing so not only increases the Performance Max Campaign but also increases customer engagement and conversion rate. If everything goes as per the expectations, this might even quadruple your ROAS (return on ad spend).

We know the Performance Max campaign is a goal-based campaign that uses automation technologies across bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution to help you drive more traffic and better conversion value. It is built to perform well across various marketing goals and media platforms. 

Advertisers create Performance Max campaigns to buy and optimize ads across Youtube, display, search, Gmail, discover, and Google maps.

After testing Performance Max campaigns over the past few months, Google ads have developed several tips that will assist you in optimizing your Pmax to drive better results. The following are:

• Decide your targeting goals and optimize the campaign to achieve them. Goals can include generating leads and increasing online or offline sales.
• Run campaigns for at least six weeks so you have enough data to compare results, and the machine learning algorithm has time to ramp up.
• Include at least five different text assets in your asset group (4 headlines & 5 descriptions).
• Include at least 5 different versions of image assets (of size 1200X1200) in your asset group.
• Use relevant audience lists as signals to hasten the ramp-up of machine learning.
• To value offline and online conversions correctly, use value-based bidding strategies. Also, import offline conversions regularly. If you’re utilizing the Maximize conversions or tCPA bid strategy, choose the deepest funnel conversion action with qualified leads, and set the tCPA accordingly.
• Performance Max is powered by machine learning. Add as much information as possible to enhance your campaign’s results. Use improved conversions or offline conversion import for lead generation to correctly value conversions.
• Creativity is the most powerful tool to drive performance and allow you to customize the campaign to relevant audiences. Add more assets to your campaign to gather more users. The more assets, the more potential ad formats can be created for different channels and users.
• Also, make sure your image asset meets Google’s highest quality guidelines (discovery, image assets, videos ads, for example). 
• Create different asset groups to target different audiences.
• Ask for necessary information only. Irrelevant questions decrease the completion rate and hence increase CPA. 
• Your CTA should either direct people to the website to fill out the form or ask them to do so in the ad format (discovery, Youtube, search extension).
• A new tool called Final URL helps you find new, profitable queries that keyword-based search campaigns may not cover.
• Must add audience signals. Your data, which includes customer match and visitor lists from your website and custom segments, are the most useful audience signals to supply.

These are a few pointers that Google provided to assist you in optimizing your Performance Max campaigns. It’s not the end, though. Google will introduce some new features in Performance Max over the upcoming months, some of which are tailored specifically for merchants and companies with physical locations, to help businesses to optimize campaigns for acquiring new customers exclusively. To increase foot traffic to stores, retailers with vocal inventory feed will see new search and map ad formats powered by their products.

Recently, Google launched a new campaign type in Google ads, “Performance Max Campaign,” that claims to get more sales/conversions. Final URL Expansion is a feature that Google provides in a performance max campaign. Using Final URL expansion will provide you with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search intent.

How to Implement Final URL Expansion In Performance Max?

When you create a Performance Max Campaign, you will be there to ask for the Final URL. Now you can add a specific product page or landing page to your website and make headlines around that particular page or product.

The final URL helps you optimize your Performance Max Campaign. It would be best to replace it with the absolute URL with a specific landing page. It will also help you get more CTR because the Performance Max Campaign will spread it across Google platforms Like search, YouTube, and display. 

How To Use URL Exclusion In Performance Max

This feature in Performance Max will boost your performance more than you expect. You can use this to exclude specific pages in your campaign. Suppose you are target page abc.com/product, and now you can exclude the main home page URL in that particular Performance Max Campaign abc.com in the URL Exclusion section.

How To Use Excluding URLs Rule 

Suppose you have a URL containing a specific product category abc.com/category/shoes, and some subcategories exist in the variety. You want to keep some sort running and exclude URLs in Bulk, and you can use this Excluding URLs Rule.

This feature in Performance Max is helpful for both lead base and eCommerce businesses. You can try these excellent URL expansion rules in your Performance Max campaigns and see how these rules perform in your google ad account and how impactful these rules are for your campaign performance. 

How to Opt-Out of Final URL Expansion?

You can also disable this feature if you don’t want to use the final URL Expansion in your performance max campaign. Google gives us the option to opt-out of the last URL expansion.

1. First, you need to select your performance campaign
2. Click on edit campaign
3. Now go to the campaign setting
4. Click on the additional location down below
5. Click on Final URL Expansion
6. Now you can turn it off and use your custom URL

Performance Max Campaign is the new buzz in the town. While many of us are trying to find the best optimization strategy. To start a plan of action, you must check how your assets perform. Follow these steps to achieve this:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads Account.
2. Click on the Performance Max Campaign.
3. Click on asset group.
4. For the asset group, you want to look at, click view details.

Inside The Asset Report:

• Filters and Download:

If you have multiple assets in your Performance Max, You can filter them by asset type, policy approval status, and Performance. You can expand as well as download the asset report.

• Asset Group Policy Issues:

If there is any policy violation in your asset group, you can check it by hovering over the “status” column to read more about the policy violation.

• Assets:

In the asset column, you’ll find the following:

1. Content of each asset(Text, Image Thumbnail)
2. Asset dimensions for images

Types Of Assets In Performance Max Campaign:

• Headline
• Long headline
• Description
• Image
• YouTube video

Performance:

The performance column ranks assets in comparison with other assets in 3 categories:

1. Low
2. Good
3. Best

You will see a “Pending” message until enough data is available. Replace low-performing assets with New assets.

Combinations Report:

You can see the combination of the top-performing assets for each asset group. It gives you insight into how your creatives serve as ads. 

It shows the six best combinations containing text, images, and videos so you can get an idea of how your top-performing ads are serving.

You Can also preview how your top-performing combination is serving on channels such as Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, etc.

Instructions:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click on the campaigns. 
3. Click on the Performance Max Campaign.
4. Click on asset groups.
5. Click on combinations to view the combinations report.
6. Each asset type will have six tiles displaying the top six combinations.
7. To obtain a preview of the asset combinations on different networks, click Preview Ads on these tiles.

Consumers today are very selective about their shopping habits. Businesses leave no stone unturned to provide their customers with the best shopping experience. They are always eager to step up their marketing game to attract more and more customers. Performance Max ads are the best way to attain the customer’s heed, as they find the right mix of inventory and formats across all Google ads channels to assist you with high in-store and online sales. Your classic smart shopping and local campaigns have now been upgraded to Performance Max Campaigns.

All smart shopping campaigns created in the merchant center have been automatically upgraded to Performance Max. Your campaign will now, by default, use Performance Max when you create a new campaign in the merchant center. With this upgrade, you get additional access to new inventory and automation insights, along with all the basic features you had with your smart shopping and local campaigns. 

Performance Max campaigns, the latest generation of smart shopping campaigns, assist you in reaching more customers through all Google Ads channels, including YouTube, search, and discover. This post will let you know important details and changes concerning the upgrade and advantages of Performance Max.

Upgrade Details

The upgrade details include the following:

• Goals, budget, bid strategy, creative assets, and product targeting are a few campaign settings that have been automatically migrated to Performance Max. You can also include audience signals into the campaign to hasten machine learning optimization. To enable serving on more inventory after the upgrade, we suggest including more creative assets in your Performance Max campaigns, such as text, photos, and videos.

• Now that you have upgraded your smart shopping and local campaigns to Performance Max, you can no longer reactivate them. However, you can always have a look at historical data for your smart shopping and local campaigns in your Google ads accounts.

What Are The Advantages Of Performance Max Campaigns?

• Performance Max, a goal-based campaign type, helps you achieve your marketing goals throughout the entire Google ads inventory. You can include your company’s goals as the primary target for Performance Max and let Google ads automation locate your clients across all Google sites.

• Performance Max campaigns serve on additional Google inventory. The ads can run on YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.

• Performance Max improves the campaign’ Performance by using the most advanced attribution and machine learning tools available in Google ads.

• The automation system in this campaign saves you more time so that you can focus on more strategic and impactful optimizations.

• Retail advertisers who switch to Performance Max campaigns get an average 12% increase in the conversion value at the same or better ROAS (return on ad spend).

An asset group is a set of assets used to create advertisements depending on the channel it’s being presented on. It is best if you organize asset groups the way you organize your ad groups, by a common theme. You may, for instance, attempt to divide asset groups based on different goods or services you provide. Additionally, depending upon the Google ad channel (YouTube, Gmail, Search, etc.) on which your ad is being displayed, Google ads automatically mix and match these assets. For your advertising aim, an asset group is utilized to compile all of your ads and create an inventory for all applicable ad types.

Different campaigns cannot share the same asset group. One campaign can have a maximum of 100 asset groups, and each campaign requires a minimum of one asset group. 

When building your campaign, you can create one asset group and add more asset groups to the existing campaigns. Google will display the most pertinent creative for your campaign once it automatically assembles the assets in an asset group into all appropriate ad formats for your goal. The system can build more ad formats and add your ad to more inventory the more assets you submit.

To generate ads that appear on Google Search, Google Maps, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover feed, and Google partner websites, one asset from an asset group, can be mixed with any other asset from the same group.

Final URL In The Asset Groups

There must be at least one final URL in the asset group, though there could be one or more final URLs. Use the most relevant URL to the campaign objectives and the provided asset group’s conversion path. The asset group’s final URL cannot be excluded from the webpage campaign requirements.

Suppose the assets are not generic enough to be utilized across URLs in the domain, and you are using URL expansion. In that case, you can create unique asset groups for different final URLs.

If you want to customize your assets according to the audience, you can create multiple assets for the same final URL. You can also make several asset groups for each theme.

Performance Max: What is it?

The key difference between Performance Max and other ads is “Automation.” Google uses automation to target and distributes the campaign depending on the information provided by the advertiser.

Smart campaigns and Performance Max are two distinct types of automated campaigns; however, they are somewhat similar.

Google will automate ad production, similar to responsive display ads, but solely using the assets supplied. The fact that Performance Max uses dynamic ad formats and runs across numerous places and that performance reporting by audience and placement are constrained are other similarities between Performance Max and social campaigns.

Where Does Performance Max Operate?

Performance Max campaigns can run on any of Google’s inventory, which significantly sets them apart from the company’s other campaign kinds. Performance Max campaigns can easily play any of the roles played by Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery campaigns.

Choices And Settings Available With Performance Max 

You can choose your objective while setting up a Performance Max campaign. You can further link product streams and retail locations based on your objectives.

Cost And Bidding

After that, you’ll decide on your budget and bidding approach. You should know that the bidding strategy options include maximum conversions and value. Still, you may specify a maximum cost per acquisition (CPA) or a maximum value or conversion, enabling you to use the maximum CPA and ROAS strategies.

Language, Location, & Ad Timing

You will then select your locations. Setting up the targeting is more time-consuming than most ads at the moment because the Google Ads editor does not support Performance Max. If you want to include a number of locations, you can select “input another location,” which will expand to show a blank area and a link for “advanced search.” To import bulk locations, click on the “advanced search” link.

Additional URL Options

The available URLs are crucial. Unless you toggle that option off, Google will, by default, define its final URLs. You do have the choice to exclude links if you let Google send traffic to whatever sites it chooses.

Establishing “Asset Groups” or Ads

The next step will include setting up an “asset group,” which is essentially an advertisement and resembles a responsive display asset. This “asset category” is referred to as such since it benefits all platforms, and advertisers can create numerous “asset groups.”

Configuring Ad-Extensions

For the Performance Max campaigns, you can either select and create unique site links or use the already-existing account-level site link extensions. Based on your goals, the campaign will recommend extension forms. For instance, the campaign will advise developing a lead form extension if your primary objective is lead generation. Structured snippets, pricing extensions, promotion extensions, callouts, and call extensions are further options.

What Are Included in Performance Max Reports?

The lack of performance reporting has been acknowledged. It was revealed during the Google marketing Livestream that Google would take action to increase transparency in Google Max campaigns after hearing advertiser input regarding reporting transparency. 

Reporting is restricted in its present form. Similar to any other campaign, advertisers can report on the overall Performance of a campaign, and transparency is lost during the breaks.

The First Actions You Can Take Are:

• Advertisers can report top-level campaign performance.
• The Performance of a location can be reported by advertisers (and if advertising a chain, the store report is available based on location extensions)
•  Advertisers can report Performance by day of the week, day and hour, or all three.

Things You Can’t Report On 

It is not feasible to report on Performance per asset group, even though you can add numerous asset groups (ads). In display, for example, you may now report on Performance by responsive display ad, but you cannot significantly break down that Performance by an individual asset. You cannot break out Performance by asset group with Performance Max (ad).

Additionally, no targeted information is provided. The audiences offered won’t necessarily be used as targets but rather to identify qualifications and indications to help find other possible prospects. Remember that the targeting characteristics provided are used as indicators to identify other potential consumers in-market.

There is no market reporting, keyword reporting, or demographic reporting. Therefore, there is no way to know who has seen your advertisement. This implies that these items cannot have exclusions added to them, and advertisers cannot exclude users or report on device performance.

How Effective Is Performance Max?

Performance Max uses machine learning algorithms to optimize bids and placements to drive conversions or conversion value for your goals; however, you supply crucial inputs like audience signals (including your customer data), high-quality text, images, and videos that can significantly boost the effectiveness of your campaign. Using conversion values and establishing value rules, you can also supply crucial information about the conversion types that benefit your company.