Google Performance Max Campaigns

Projections show that the global advertising market will reach a size of $792.7 billion by 2027.

If you are into digital marketing, this article will help you optimize your advertising through Google’s channels.

Almost all businesses rely on strong and specific advertising to connect with leads and make conversions.

When done right, your advertising campaign can be very effective and generate good returns.

One of the best ways to ensure this is by using Google Performance Max, which you can access and create inside your Google ads account. It exposes your ad creatives across the Google ads inventory and can help increase online sales faster. Especially when you consider e-commerce and shopping enabled businesses.

So what is Google Performance Max, and why should you be using it?

Keep reading to find out.

What Is Google Performance Max?

Performance Max is a type of Google ads campaign that advertisers can use across various advertising channels. Google’s machine learning (https://ai.google/education/) will try to optimize and show the ad(s) to the right person, at the right time, on the right channel to get the best conversion value, which will help increasing online sales.

Google’s real time understanding of where your new customers are during their research and online shopping habits, is the magical essence of the performance max ad system.

It’s all about finding the customers and prospects where they are. Read more on the Google PMax blog here.

Google PMAX campaigns include:

• Search – impressions for keyword based search campaigns and display text based ads in general search results pages
• Discovery campaigns – visually engaging, personalized ads
• Maps – the Google maps ecosystem
• Gmail – ad display campaigns running inside Gmail
• Display – display campaigns running powered by performance max campaigns
• YouTube – Display ads and videos on the 2nd largest search engine in the world
• Shopping – Feeds from Google Merchant Center for shopping and local campaigns

Your company can use a range of ad formats to gain a more significant presence and reach a wider audience and obtain planned marketing objectives.

You can set performance max campaign conversion goals you want to reach and use automated bidding technology to help achieve them.

How to set up Google PMAX Campaigns

Under the “Campaigns” section in your Google Ads system, click the “New campaign” (Blue plus button) and you will be presented with the screen below.

Initially, choose the campaign with without goal guidance.

Next, choose the campaign type: “Performance max”. Next, follow the prompts and set the daily budgets, the bid strategy (use Maximize Conversions at firs), select locations (Geo) and enter the creative assets and audience signals.

If you have not created your assets (images, videos, logos) – work with your creative team to get this in motion and approve everything before you begin. Multiple asset groups are important as well.

Start with a single campaign at first. Campaign run dates is allocated within the 15-30 day timeframe. It takes a while to gather data, optimize and maximize campaign performance.

Use the equation of “3-4x AOV” as your starting budget. For example, if you sell a product with an average order value of $100.00, expect to spend $300-$400 as an initial test budget. (This is a simplification but will get you started with optimizing performance and let the smart bidding begin).

Performance max reports are found when clicking “Insights” from the left navigation. There, you’ll see a week-over-week review of essential metrics and performance insights.

Benefits of Google Performance Max Campaigns

There are various types of paid marketing that you can implement. Google campaigns can often prove beneficial, which is why so many brands use Google Performance Max. Let PMAX find potential customers.

Find More Customers

You can establish a brand presence with the Google ads platform using one campaign. This will help get more eyes on your brand, increasing your lead conversions.

With Performance Max, you can set different conversion values. This will help you get the best ROI in terms of things like lead generation, online sales, and offline sales.

Get More Value

With any marketing campaign, value from customer acquisition and return on investment is several of the most crucial aspects. Performance Max allows you to optimize ads and present them to your target audience. This helps you maximize the ROI of your campaign, helping to increase your profits.

As your campaign progresses, Performance Max will analyze the highest-performing opportunities. It will then automatically allocate more funds to these, helping to generate more conversions.

You can also use Maximize Conversions with tCPA or tROAS. With these, you can decide how Google sets its bids. Using tROAS lets you set an original bid to target, then you can make adjustments throughout your campaign.

Better Insights

Performance Max will provide insights that are relevant and simple to work with.

This makes it easy to see which areas of your campaign are working best, and which areas are less effective. You can then make changes to improve your campaign moving forward.

And, do not forget to implement and track even more data points + campaign performance with Google Analytics. URL tracking options on all ads for best performance tracking. Leverage ad extensions such as sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and more.

Use Google’s Best Automation Tools

Performance Max gives you access to various other Google Ads automation tools that can help with your campaign. You’ll also get property auction data that will give you to improve things as time goes by.

When to Use Google Performance Max

Your use of Performance Max should be based on what you’re trying to achieve. If you want to appear on various Google advertising platforms, this is one of the most efficient ways to do so. As it’s automated, it can also be suitable for small businesses that want to start a Google campaign but don’t have much experience in creating a marketing strategy.

Note: While PMAX may be marketed as a “beginner’s tool” for starting Google advertising, you still need to research + build your creative brief and overall marketing objectives, goals and plans. (This is not always straightforward and you may need help from new customer acquisition experts and PMAX specialists).

IMPORTANT: The creative assets (images, videos) form the foundation for successful PMAX campaigns. It is not enough to copy images from a public image directory, or pull videos from sites like Envato Elements and upload them into PMAX.

You will need a creative development plan, a creative staff – with copywriters, art directors and creative chiefs. And you need to understand how to translate data collected into actionable changes to test further.

The key is to get cold traffic to work within established KPI metrics. And yes, that includes middle and bottom of funnel.

However, 70-80% of your budget and strategic creatives should be used to position your brand and messaging top of funnel, as that will drive a steady flow of qualified traffic into your funnels and shopping experiences.

PMAX is an AI-driven platform that makes it powerful by itself. And when you add omni-channel exposure and remarketing across multiple networks, you’ll be able to unlock a powerful model for acquiring more customers and grow your sales faster.

It’s worth noting that there are other methods you can use that may create better growth opportunities, but these generally require a lot more work than Performance Max.

If you want to get the absolute best results, you may want to look into another strategy – just know that you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything that makes it as easy as Performance Max.

Should You Use Google Performance Max?

If you want to create an effective campaign that will reach your target audience across a range of platforms, Google Performance Max is an excellent way to go. It will streamline the entire process through automation, and get more eyes on your brand to increase conversions.

Chaosmap is a leading advertising agency for advertising on Google Ads, YouTube Ads, Facebook/Meta ads, and more. We have tested performance max across lead generation and smart shopping campaigns, and find Performance max campaigns to be a game changer in the e-commerce markets.

If you want to improve your marketing strategy and create a highly optimized Google ad campaigns, which include Google performance max, smart shopping, local campaigns, search ads, Youtube ads, we’ve got you covered.

To find out more about how we can help your business, click here to contact us today for a quote.

Run Google performance max campaigns today and get better results.