Find out how Performance Max is different from other Google Ads programs and how it can help you get more sales and spend less money.
Some PPC managers still don’t believe Performance Max can do great things, but now they can’t. To do that, you’ll need to think about it differently than you would Search and Shopping.
Let me give you an example
You used to make a separate Shopping ad for each brand when you worked with stores that sold goods from a lot of different brands. If you do that to Performance Max, it will do something it wasn’t made to do. And it won’t be running at its best.
With Performance Max, it’s all about consolidation. It will work much better if you use its smart algorithms and machine learning. But if you keep doing the same things you did in different types of campaigns, Performance Max will punish you because it is a program.
To keep those needles moving in the right direction, here’s everything you need to know about Google’s Performance Max program.
What is Performance Max?
Performance Max in Google Ads brings together all the great things about the biggest search engine in the world. Google has been collecting information about people’s browsing and shopping habits for years, which has helped them make a campaign that is specific to each search.
Performance Max lets advertisers share all kinds of assets and access all of Google’s ad placements from a single campaign. This means that advertisers don’t have to put ads in specific types of inventory, like search results or product listings.
Text, Videos, Feeds, Images
Performance Max was first made available to a small group of accounts in its test (2020) and beta (2021) stages. In 2022, just before the busy holiday shopping season, it was made available to all Google Ads users.
Google has continued to support Performance Max since then by adding new tools, such as brand exclusions and reporting at the asset group level.
What makes Performance Max powerful?
There are a lot of different types of campaigns that Google wanted Performance Max to be able to handle for most marketers. Some of the things that make that possible are listed below.
Targeting capabilities
In campaign targeting, keywords, groups, and product feeds are still the most important things. This is also true for Performance Max, but what makes this strategy unique is how these three parts behave and work together.
Performance Max will quickly skip over any basic settings you give it in search of the best conversions, but these will help it get off to a better start from the start.
Audience signals
These will help Performance Max figure out what kind of people you want to see your ads, but keep in mind that they won’t be those exact people.
When you send your customer list as an audience signal, it doesn’t mean that your ad will show to that person or even people like them. It just gives the ad a place to start targeting people.
Keywords
Based on custom intent audiences, product data feed, and website URLs, Performance Max will quickly start targeting broad queries that are not directly related to your original targeting intent.
Not having negative keywords can be annoying, but you may still find chances you didn’t even think of. You can also use keywords to make custom intent groups that Performance Max can then look at.
Product feed
The product feed is always very important for Shopping ads because it’s a strong data feed.
You need to make sure your product feed is optimized so Google knows which queries to show your goods for.
Because Performance Max takes you down different paths from your original one, you will find options you didn’t even think of.
Bid management
Setting cost-per-click (CPC) bids: Performance Max uses Smart Bidding to do this. This means that marketers have two choices when it comes to bid strategies:
- Increase conversions by setting a CPA goal, if you want to.
- Get the most out of your conversions by setting an extra ROAS goal.
We need a lot of history data from your account so that Google can figure out what worked best in the past for this to work at its best.
I usually tell new accounts to start with Search or Standard Shopping to gather information. They should only switch to Performance Max after they’ve reached their maximum impression share and started getting a steady flow of sales.
Complex auctions and intent matching
That’s a lot of information that Google has about how people act online.
We never get to see what those 70 million signs are because Smart Bidding does its job in almost real-time (a tenth of a second). To make this work, you have to trust the system a bit. If you do that, you’ll get what you want.
Think about 100 people who are all looking for the same thing. Every person will be at a different point in the buying process, and their individual pasts will affect things like how quickly they may click “Convert.” During that search, the machine will try to find the people who are most likely to become customers.
Fill those data feeds with the right information for e-commerce, like keywords in names and descriptions, how to group products, and so on. People who are “window shopping” or ready to buy will be able to find you through as many searches as possible.
New customer acquisition and brand exclusions
Advertisers can target net new income by bidding higher for new acquisitions for a long time now. Just recently, Performance Max started rolling out brand exclusions to give you more control over when your ads show up for branded queries.
You might not need these features as much for smaller advertisers, but now bigger brands that want to grow can tell the system to focus on better chances. Using these features together can make a big difference in how fast and profitably a growing process works.
We can better use these for segmentation now that asset group-level data is being rolled out to more accounts. When we see that some product groups—brands, categories, or individual items—aren’t doing as well or getting as much attention, we either leave them out or put them in a new Performance Max promotion to make them spend more money.
It’s like cutting back on campaigns that aren’t getting enough attention or sales.
Smart Search
Google just recently said that Dynamic Search ads can be upgraded to Performance Max. Keep in mind that you’ve always had the ability to do it; now you just need to click one button.
You should start trying it through Performance Max now, though, since Dynamic Search is likely to be the next feature to be killed and deprecated soon. Remember that Local and Smart Shopping campaigns are already part of Performance Max.
What sets Performance Max apart from other Google Ads campaigns?
Let’s look at a few things that make Performance Max different from other products that are made for specific placements.
Inventory and ad spend
It’s pretty clear that you can only bid and set a limit at the campaign level.
Performance Max doesn’t show you exactly where it spent your money, which is where things get tricky. This is related to its ability to report.
However, even though you’re getting traffic from sites that might not be as good as Search and Shopping, Performance Max is still only targeting people who are likely to buy. In some industries, the cost per click is also very high. Performance Max can really lower total costs by looking outside of those industries.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Performance Max costs a lot all at once. Don’t forget to add in the cost of collecting data while you learn how to run a new campaign.
It will take longer than three to six weeks if you have a new account.
But as you run more campaigns and get better results, the learning phase should end faster and prices should go down. This will give you more money to bid more aggressively or get more conversions.
Reporting: You can see reports for each campaign and asset group in Performance Max. These reports are in the Reporting tab of Google Ads.
A lot of people I talk to, though, never go to the page where they can make their own reports based on the landing page, placements, location, time of day, or goods in their data feed. You can also see how much of your ad spend is based on data feeds and how much is based on artistic ideas.
We also really like the new Insights tab that Google made (the update is still being rolled out). In the past, you could only go back 7 or 28 days. Now, you can pick any time range and download keywords. There’s useful information in there, so don’t skip it!
Reporting
Someone else’s scripts can help you track where your ads are going. That’s something I tend to avoid.
From my point of view, the strategy is either working or it’s not. There are buttons you can pull to try something else when it’s not working.
You can’t choose when or where your ad appears with Performance Max; all you can do is push and pull the system. You can no longer see more specific terms either. Instead, you can only see keyword themes.
Transparency
You can use third-party scripts to determine where your ads are going. Personally, I tend to shy away from that.
The way I see it, whether the campaign is performing or not. When it isn’t, there are levers you can pull to try something different.
With Performance Max, you can’t decide when or where your ad shows up – only nudge and guide the algorithm. You also lose the ability to see more granular keywords, instead getting access to keyword themes.
I think accepting this is fundamental to success with Performance Max.
But while you can’t see your ad placements, there is an account-level placement report with impression data. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give you a breakdown of cost and revenue.
Keep in mind that the goal of all of this is to move to a format similar to Advantage Plus in Facebook, which only surfaces data that you can act on.
Control
It’s what a lot of people call a “set it and forget it” effort. No, not really.
You are in charge, but it’s not like other efforts we’ve seen.
You tell the system to do the work you used to do, leaving you to make choices that machines can’t. In Performance Max, that means the following:
- Ad copy
- Creatives
- Audience signals
- Data feeds
- Bid strategies
- Cost plans
- Structure of the campaign
It’s not so much taking one step back as taking a step back to see the big picture.
Involvement
How much do you have to do to get the most out of Performance Max? Don’t forget that your job is to steer the machine in the right way and make sure it doesn’t go off track.
Part of that is learning how to control the urge to make changes because you feel like that’s the only way to be engaged. It could be because your clients keep asking you why you changed so little last month.
But sometimes that’s all you need to do with Performance Max.
Instead, your role is more likely to be one of keeping an eye on things and making big changes. Once you’re done, you can step back and let the ad run. Watch what’s going on while you work behind the scenes.
Make sure that any first-party data you use is clean and correct, that your site is connected to a CRM (to get leads), and that the content on your landing pages is better. These are all things that affect how much money you make and how efficiently you use your time.
Performance Max in action: Sample campaign structures
If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be hard to get going with a Performance Max program. I’ve made ads for a variety of account types, as shown below.
E-commerce
When people shop online, there are two main types of advertisers:
Sells own brand
Most of the time, these accounts start with paid social media. They may spend as much as 70% to 80% of their advertising budget on Facebook and TikTok. Google may not even have been planned.
For the same reasons that the brand works well on paid social, Performance Max with creative assets tends to work really well with these brands.
Sells multiple brands
There are some clients whose stores have hundreds of thousands of SKUs, so it’s important for them to show up at the very bottom of the funnel. For these accounts, Google Ads are the best way to go.
Focusing on “Smart Shopping” instead of creative assets is what we do most of the time. This means that target signals and ad copy are less important. We instead spend almost all of our time making sure the data feed is almost perfect.
