Microsoft Ads Performance Max

Key Takeaways

we're used to this by now right everything Google does Microsoft is going to do fairly soon after that and it's happened again Microsoft has performance Max campaigns currently in beta and we're going to cover it today now of course Microsoft is not Google so while the performance Max setup is going to be very familiar there are definitely some differences between the two different channels so we'll hop in to get an understanding of how you can register for performance Max to get it within your accounts and then we'll go through the entire campaign set up on the screen right now is the blog post from when Microsoft ads announc performance Max in open Beta you can see it's from August 1st of 2023 they don't really say much within this announcement but if we scroll down a little bit in the paragraph just under the image there are a couple things you need to do in order to start testing performance Max within your accounts the first one is a no-brainer you have to make sure that you have conversion tracking setup since performance Max relies heavily on automation it needs conversion signal to have any chance to try to improve performance with the automation I shouldn't even have to say this conversion tracking should be one of the first things you do when setting up an account but the real reason why I wanted to pull up this blog post is to tell you how you can get access to the open Beta if you have a Microsoft rep just reach out to them it's exactly what I did for a few of my clients I just had to verify that I wanted to participate within the beta and then I had access but if you go to the blog post which I already shared the link on the screen there is a link to talk to support and support can potentially help you get access to the open Beta too now that that's taken care of let's go into Microsoft ads and start setting up a new campaign I'm in the campaign View and you see I have a few search campaigns up and before we start creating a new campaign I did want to mention a few things Microsoft has said within their help articles on performance Max a few ways that performance Max will coexist with your current search campaigns now Microsoft is saying that performance Max is there to complement your current search campaign campaigns and any performance won't impact the keyword targeting for your current search campaigns that you may also be running if there is a search query that matches a keyword that you're targeting within one of your Active search campaigns then the search campaign will get priority if the search query doesn't match any of the target keywords that you have within your search campaigns Microsoft says the ad with the highest relevance and performance will display during the ad delivery and this is important to know because about a year ago Microsoft started to remove the ability to exclude Audience Network from our search campaigns so even though they're quote unquote search campaigns you still could be showing up on different sites within the Audience Network like MSN Outlook and thousands of other ones we really haven't seen the best performance from The Audience Network from our search campaigns so we've been excluding a lot of those URLs and we teach you how to do it in this video but we wanted to bring it up to explain how performance Max and search can still compete against each other not only in search but also on Microsoft's Audience Network so let's go ahead and create a new campaign again I already have conversion tracking set up I'm not going to walk through that process I'm assuming you've already had that done so I'm going to go to create and there are a variety of campaign objectives that you could choose but performance Max will not be available for every single one this particular account is Leen so they don't have Merchant feeds but you'll see within the process you can attach shopping feeds to a performance Max campaign so this campaign OB objective of selling products will have performance Max available see as I click on it performance Max is an option you look at phone calls to the business performance Max is an option certain things like video views won't be an option CU as it says in the blue bar it's only available for the Audience Network and performance Max will incorporate search within it so those particular ones won't count same thing with app downloads go back to campaigns but visits to the website looking to get conversions that's all fine for now I'm just going to stick with a traffic focused campaign goal and of course we want performance Max choose this option we'll click next go ahead and name your campaign paste it in something simple choose your budget choose your bid strategy remember I selected the goal of visits to my website not a conversion focused bid strategy and still the options for the bid strategy are automated bidding conversions or conversion value hence why you need to have conversion tracking set up in order to even think about using performance Max this option I'm going to choose maximize conversions and then I'm going to scroll down to locations since I actually do plan on testing this for this particular client I need to change my country all the location targeting options for Microsoft that you're used to still apply to Performance Max and if I keep scrolling down update my location targeting trying to keep it to people actually in the location there's your language if you need to choose campaign specific goals for this account there you go and as I mentioned in the previous screen when choosing your campaign goal here's the option to attach your Merchant store and your feed to this particular campaign so there you go e-commerce stores but I'm going to continue to some of the advanced campaign settings I'm good with 24 hours a day I want to turn off final URL expansion and then I'm going to save and go to the next step and then we will go down and add our final URL I'm going to paste in the URL for our leaden course we just released you should check it out link is also in the video description next you can add up to 20 images and as we add them we will see the ad preview update just like Google Microsoft has an asset Library where you can proactively start importing all your images and videos that you may want to use for ads or ad extensions so anything that's already uploaded to the asset Library will be available to add for your performance Max campaign asset groups but if you don't have anything uploaded you can click on the plus button this client does have images uploaded so I had to blur those out I'm going to add some pay me Pro stuff right now there's one going to add some more okay there's just three I highly recommend that you add much more than this especially with these two being pretty similar but you get an idea of how they look and as you go and edit between how these may look here's MSN bing.com Carousel ad on Microsoft Edge and someone's Outlook pretty much email type ads similar to Gmail ads on Google for whatever reason you can click on edit aspect ratio and maybe look at cropping certain images if you're not happy with how it looks in a particular placement go ahead and do that then we'll go and add our logo there's our image and then scrolling down to the text port we can add up to 15 short headlines five long headlines up to five long headlines I should say and then up to five descriptions so I'm just going to fill in some information here for the sake of time I'm not going to fill in every single available line but just something so we can get an idea of what the preview looks like on the right I would normally put way more time into add copy than I did for this video but you could see with what we have one thing I do like about Microsoft if I go ahead and add another headline is I think they give you many any more options to consider with your headlines than what Google does for performance Max most of these do make sense not saying I would use all of them then all my ad copy would sound the same but then I also have to point out VI are recommended heel lines and then once again after you have all of your ad copy in there with your images variety of ways of how our ad could look interesting how it is cut off there wonder how they're going to use that there's Outlook business name we haven't gotten to that portion yet that's going to be down here let's update it here's our business name scrolling down let's find a decent Cod called to action option they do give us a lot and now let's see how it looks when it's updated there's our business name CTA isn't showing but there's a variety of options for us to look at and see if we want to crop our images scrolling down a little bit more options is pretty much just some URL stuff I'm going to skip for now you can look at that later if you want to track any URL stuff specifically but the audience signal portion for Microsoft is optional and while it's optional I highly recommend you give Microsoft some signals of who you actually want to reach you can look at creating new ones or browse existing signals for the sake of this video I'm going to look at creating a new one just going to name it remarketing for now because it's remarketing I'm not going to use the interests that are available within Microsoft but this is an option and here's where you can add Microsoft's inm market audience to your asset group if you want to use that cancel out of here what I will use for this client is remarketing that's how they're going to feel comfortable testing performance Max so you can choose from any existing audience that you have created within Microsoft ads I'm going to be using the standard website remarketing lists but there's Dynamic remarketing especially if you're doing any sort of specific product ads customer list uploads combination of these easy enough all visitors 60 days good size list going to choose that one click add and yes you can choose a combination of in Market as well as your first- party data if we look at demographics select any of these that make sense or uncheck those boxes as well good enough for now going to click save and there we see the remarketing list is the the signal I'm going to use for this asset group choose which St we would want to run it and click save now you can go create multiple different asset groups I'm going to have to wait because this one is specifically under review but even after your setup is done you are going to have to continue to wait cuz Microsoft says there is a learning period for their performance Max campaigns and it could take up to a week for your performance Max campaigns to go live after you've set up a campaign but they also mention that the average learning period for the campaign could be anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks now that's learning period not live period so performance Max needs a little bit more time potentially to start seeing performance if you're the type of person who if you don't see conversions within a day or two and you pause a campaign this might not be the option for you or you just flat out have the wrong expectations since a good chunk of performance Max will run on search we do see extensions are here so go ahead and include your extensions that you want here it's not showing me the account Account button so you may have to apply even the account level extensions that you're okay with to this particular campaign that's something I'm not going to do now I'd have to blur everything out later then if we head back up to our overall performance Max campaigns once everything's running you could view the stats here just like Google I would go up to segment break things down by Network how are the performance Max campaigns performing on Microsoft whether it's on bing.com part of the Audience Network and potentially other sites that'll give you some information on what you need to optimize your asset groups to try to improve ad performance on whichever Network may be struggling I went back up clicked on this specific campaign there's ways for you to see specific information just about the performance Max campaign that you have selected and if you head back up to asset groups you can go up and click on table and here's where you can get breakdown performance for each asset group I just created the one but if you went ahead and tested out a variety of different targeting options or if the targeting options have stayed the same and you just want to do image testing here's where you can review the information there you can go up modifier columns to pull in the information that you need to see that is important for you to make the proper decisions now I know Microsoft also has smart campaigns and their overall digital marketing Center where you can manage Facebook through Microsoft some Google stuff through Microsoft I believe Pinterest is part of it now you cannot manage performance Max through their main digital marketing Center but as you can see the setup is very similar to what's our running within Google just a few different nuances and how it works where your ads are going to be shown mostly talking about the networks the signals that you can input into your asset groups as well as the potential learning and live periods performance Max is here it's not going away so if you're dedicated to learning and prepping for what's coming in the future I recommend getting into the open beta and start testing it now if there are any other questions about Microsoft ads performance Max or just performance Max campaigns in general feel free to ask ask us in the comments below thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below if you really liked it maybe think about subscribing to the paid media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops if you really really liked it you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on 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