You’ve likely seen or heard about Google Ad’s new campaign type - Performance Max. And if not - where have you been?!

But what exactly is it and why should you be using it?

What is Performance Max?

It’s a new goal-based campaign that allows advertisers to access all of their Google Ads elements from within a single campaign.

This means one campaign is capable of delivering across all of the Google advertising channels:

• Search
• Shopping
• Display
• Youtube
• Discover
• Gmail
• Maps

‍How does it work?‍

It uses machine learning to optimise performance in real-time to help you improve performance.

Simply put, you give Google your goals, assets and some supporting information and it will optimise bids and placements etc.‍

Why should I be using it?‍

With the machine learning behind it, the campaigns see ‘live’ the intents and preferences of potential customers. 

This gives you the opportunity to garner new insight and inform both your online and offline business strategy. For example, you’ll be able to gain insight into new search trends as well as new customer segments that you might not have considered.

Additionally, by ‘seeing’ all channel activity at once, it can optimise for each of the various touchpoints from a data-driven standpoint - effectively nudging the customer towards the conversion.

‍How do I get started?‍

First, as with every campaign you need to determine the objective. Are you wanting sales, leads or even more local store visits?

Next, you need to determine your settings :

• What is your daily budget?
• Which bidding strategy to use?
• Where do you want to target and in which language?

Finally, create your asset groups and upload your assets. Think of an asset group as a section of a campaign - where assets can focus on a certain theme e.g. an offer or a specific audience segment.

You’ll want to gather a wide selection of images, logos, headlines, descriptions and videos which Google will then take and build ads across all channels.

‍Our Tips & Tricks‍

We’ve been using Performance Max campaigns for a while now, and here are 3 tips and tricks we’ve found:

1. Check your final URL options

If you want more control over which landing pages are used in the campaign, you’ll need to set specific pages for Google to use. Without this, Google will select its own final landing page. For example, it may find that blogs are an important touchpoint in the conversion journey.

2. Aim to upload the full amount of assets

This will improve the quality of your ads, as Google will be able to test different combinations of the ads and optimise for the strongest performance.

3. Remember to upload Ad Extensions

As with extensions in Search campaigns, you can also add call, callout, structured snippets and sitelinks to your Performance Max campaign which can increase your chances of the viewer clickthrough through on your ad.

So there you have it, a beginners guide to the new kid on the block - Performance Max.