Google Ads Tutorials: Creating a Performance Max campaign

Key Takeaways

[Music] the consumer journey is constantly evolving and getting more complex with new ways to discover research and purchase customers are engaging across an Ever growing number of channels it can be hard to keep up with these changes that's why more and more advertisers are turning to automation to engage customers effectively and at scale performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that works across all Google ad channels it uses the best of Google's automation capabilities including smart bidding to help you drive better performance and find more converting customers across Google's advertising channels this includes YouTube display search discover and more expanding across channels ensures that you are reaching as many valuable customers as possible it also helps you maximize performance with all the ad inventory and formats Google ads has to offer performance Max combines your goals and inputs with the power of automation to help you respond to Dynamic shifts and consumer demand in real time this allows you to invest where new conversion opportunities are no matter which channel they're on creating and managing a performance Max campaign is simple at the same time it's important to provide automation with the right highquality ingredients to drive the best results follow these steps to get started with your first campaign the first step is to select your main campaign objective and the conversion goal goal you want to drive performance towards the goals selected here will be the primary optimization Target for your performance Max campaign if you want to prioritize certain goals over others you can set or adjust your conversion values later to reflect the relevant importance of each goal once you've set up your conversion goals select performance Max as your campaign type to access all Google ad channels and inventory from a single campaign next select a budget and bid strategy for your campaign make sure that your bid strategy also aligns with your business objectives for example if you are focused on maximizing conversion value and different types of conversions generate different values for your business choose conversion value if you are focused on maximizing conversions choose conversions from the drop-down menu this is a good bid strategy to use if all conversions are worth the same to your business soon budget and Target forecast will become available to help guide you in your decision you can also add a cost per action CPA or return on ad spend Roos Target to your bid strategy not sure where to start a helpful reference point is your average CPA or Ras from the last 30 days on comparable campaigns that are optimizing towards the same conversion goals the campaign may also Auto suggest a CPA or roas Target based on your historical account performance you can use this or edit the number as needed after you set your bid strategy and targets you'll choose your campaign's location and language settings you can also adjust other settings like your ad serving schedule or start and end date tracking template and final URL suffix settings are also available here we recommend that you leave final URL expansion on to drive maximum coverage on relevant search queries performance Mac should always be run together with your core keyword-based search campaigns still the final URL expansion feature helps you show up on additional searches that have a strong likelihood of leading to conversions it uses landing page content across your website to dynamically customize headlines for your ads you can choose to exclude certain landing pages from your website as needed like your company blog or FAQ Pages final URL expansion helps you find new converting search queries that are already covered by your keyword-based search campaigns or where your performance Max campaign has a higher ad rank it then matches these new queries to relevant landing pages on your website in addition account level negative keywords allow you to exclude certain keywords from your performance Max campaigns the quality and variety of the creative assets you provide plays an important role in your campaign success asset groups that you manage different kinds of creative assets and are similar to to add groups and other campaigns your assets include the final URL or landing page that you'd like to send customers to images logos videos text headlines and descriptions and a call to action create an asset group with creative assets that are related to a single theme you can create multiple asset groups per campaign performance Max automatically assembles assets into all the available ad formats that are relevant to your conversion goals when you provide more assets this helps the campaign build a wider range of AD formats and show more compelling creative to users this also allows you to appear on more inventory to drive more conversions or value for images you can upload them from your computer load previously used assets from your account or pull in assets from your website videos can be uploaded from YouTube If you don't have a video available performance Max will automatically create a highquality video for you using your assets check the ad strength indicator to see how you may need to improve your assets you want to provide as many assets as possible since Automation and machine learning perform better when they have a variety of highquality assets to work with to find the most relevant combinations if you have unique insights about which segments of users are more likely to convert or which ads you think will resonate better with a particular audience you can use the new audience signals feature to let Google know A major benefit of automation is its ability to help you unlock new converting audience segments even ones you might not have expected or known about before performance Max campaigns help you find new valuable customers and don't limit your ads to a specific or selected set of audiences however you can use audience signals to help point the system in the right direction we strongly recommend that you input audience signal to guide automated targeting and ensure the most relevant ad is served to the most relevant audience they provide important information to help machine learning ramp up and accelerate the ability to optimize your campaign custom segments and your data which includes customer match and website visitors lists are the most helpful audience information to provide since they provide a strong signal about which audiences have a higher chance of converting after adding audience signals you'll want to include to add extensions use a variety of extensions for site links call outs calls lead forms and more these help your ads show up more prominently and also provide consumers with more helpful details about your business including different ways they can contact you after you add extensions you're nearly done creating your campaign check the summary page before you publish the campaign to see if anything's missing or if you have any errors to resolve once the campaign starts running give it a few weeks before you evaluate results especially if your business experiences conversion lags or delays where customers need extra time between when they first engage with you and when they complete the conversion in the short term look out for any AD disapprovals to make sure your ads are running as intended also check your campaign status to see if it's limited by budget if this happens consider raising your daily budget to make sure you're capturing as many conversions as you can make sure to keep an eye out for your asset performance as well to see how you can improve your creative assets Beyond The Campaign itself there are a few other adjustments you can make at the account level to further customize your performance Max campaign for example if you want to revise the conversion actions or the values for your conversion goals go to tools and settings conversions you can also update which goals are used by default in your campaigns and edit the conversion value values to reflect the importance of your goals you can consider using the same goals for performance Max as you do for other campaigns if you need more control over where your ads appear performance Max campaigns use the same brand safety settings you've applied at the account level these account settings allow you to add certain exclusions you might need such as content or inventory type exclusions you can also add placement exclusions for more best practice practices including recommendations on how to evaluate your campaign and improve it over time check out our full best practices guide on the Google ads help center