Performance Max Beginner Tutorial & Full Campaign Setup 2024 (Google Ads)

Key Takeaways

in the last couple of years performance Max campaigns have become a core campaign type for all successful advertisers or Google ads Google themselves call combination of search and performance Max campaigns they are power pair because of how well they work together in this video I'm going to show you how to set up effective performance Max campaigns if you're just here for the campaign setup feel free to skip ahead to this time code but before we jump into the campaign setup let me show you a campaign has been working on this particular account was previously managed by an agency and I took over Management on Monday September 9th here is the data from months leading up to me uh taking over the account from June 1st until September 8th as you can see the conversion value to cost for the entire period is 2.71 since I took over the account on September 9th the conversion value to cost went from 2.71 to 4.09 and since it takes a few days for Google to attribute the most recent conversions this number actually is probably higher now a quick note here this account advertises in the United Kingdom but the currency you see here is in Bulgarian Lev as the brand is based in Bulgaria but has a branch in the UK and that's why you see see this currency here to give you a bit more detail I'm going to go to a campaign View and compare the period of me managing the campaign with a preceding period you can do this by using this compare feature selecting previous period so comparing those two periods you can see that conversion value has gone down by 3.96% by the but the cost has gone down by 35.6 n% the conversion value to cost went up by almost 50% and the cost per conversion went down by 32.695124 all campaigns and all ad groups selected under your filters so you're not leaving any information out comparing the same periods as you can see on the whole account level yes the cost has gone down by 34% but conversion value at the same time has gone down by just 3.9% conversion value to cost went up by more than 45% and cost per conversion reduced by by almost 1/3 so as you can see it was not the case that can sometimes happen when one campaign can just steal attributions and conversions from another campaign and one campaign looks good whereas the whole account performance stayed the same here the whole account performance improved significantly and the performance Max campaign was a significant driver of this Improvement so in this video I want to show you how to set up performance Max campaigns for beginning so you don't have to waste your budget figuring those best practices out so how do performance Max campaigns actually work performance Max is a unique campaign type as it allows advertisers to access all Google ads inventory from a single campaign it's really designed to complement your core search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all Google's channels like YouTube display search shopping discover Gmail and Maps instead of creating individ for specific placements with performance Max you Pride Google with advertising assets meaning your headlines descriptions images videos and so on as well as your audience signals Google then takes over using its AI to match the right asset combination with the right customer across all its advertising Networks it's powerful but it does mean giving up some level of control over how your ads are delivered now when should you use performance Max campaigns this type of a campaign heavily relies on audience signals and conversion data so it's best used after you establish a baseline of success with your search campaigns here are two prerequisites uh you need to meet before launching your performance Max campaigns first you need a profitable search campaign that has been running for at least a month ideally two second you should have gathered at least 30 conversions in your account over the last 30 days giving Google enough data to optimize effectively while running your search or shopping campaign make sure you're adding observation audiences this will help you fine-tune your audience signals by understanding which audiences are most likely to convert so you can use them as signals in your performance Max contains in the future with all that in mind let's jump into creating your performance Max campaign first open your Google ads account in the top left corner click the create button then select campaign next choose your campaign objective this step is primarily for campaign setup guidance so it won't change the way your ads are shown but will guide you through the setup process if you prefer you can create a campaign without objective guidance but I typically find find it useful for this tutorial to select sales after selecting your objective you need to add your conversion goal if you chose sales like me your conversion goal will be purchases if you chose leads then your conversion goal will be your lead form submission event if you haven't set up your conversion goal yet you can go to YouTube and search for Google ads conversion goals along with your website platform name uh to find the setup guide once your conversion goals are set up come back and continue with this video once you've selected your conversion goal click continue now select the campaign type we will be choosing performance Max next a window will pop up asking you if you want to connect a merchant center account this is an important step if you're running an e-commerce business if you're not in e-commerce you don't need to link a merchant center account and you can skip this step I don't think you will even see this Step at all if you are in e-commerce and you advertise in a market where you're allow your products are uploaded and your feed is approved as you can see I have no products here this is actually an old account from a project that is no longer active but the steps in creating the campaign Remain the Same by default Google is going to show all products from all feeds in your account if you want to select a specific feed you can do so by clicking select specific feed and you're able to select by a feed label so if you have multiple feeds you need to make sure that they have different feed labels and then you would be able to select a specific feed if you have just one one feed in your account then you don't need this feature next choose your campaign name I recommend using a consistent naming convention in this uh tutorial I will be creating a campaign for a fictional apparel brand uh so I would name this campaign performance Max all Perl once you entered your campaign name click continue next you need to set your breing strategy or with performance Max campaigns you have two options conversions or conversion value if you're in e-commerce and tracking the value of your conversions I recommend focusing on conversion value if you're not tracking the value of your conversions like if you're collecting leads and treating them all the same then you can select conversions you also can add a Target return on ADD spend or Target rows for conversion value and you can add um targ Target cost per act Target CPA if you focus on conversions however when launching a new campaign I recommend leaving this unchecked initially allow your campaign to run for a month or two until it's consistently Gathering 30 conversions every 30 days then based on your results you can set a Target rows or Target CPA next is the customer acquisition section by default performance Max bits equally for new and existing customers if you check this option you can make your campaign bid higher for new customers or even be exclusively for new customers in order to be able to use customer acquisition feature you need to in an audience segment with at least 1,000 active members and this what Google will identify as your existing customers and that's how it will know who to bid more for and who to bid l less for uh there are a few cases when I would recommend using either one of those options for example if you have a segmented performance Max strategy where you have one campaign for acquiring new customers with a separate acquisition budget and you're advertising to existing customers with other campaigns another cases when you're generating leads or capturing emails and you don't want to keep advertising to people who already are on your email list then you you can use your email list to Google first but that's what you can do if you have at least a thousand person email list however in the majority of cases I recommend leaving this unchecked especially if you're running an e-commerce business as repeat purchases generate a lot of value and so you selected your customer acquisition option click next after beating Comes The Campaign settings uh section first is location you can Target by countries territories cities or even set a radius around a certain location for example you can set a 20 M radius you can also exclude locations if it makes sense for your business tutorial I will Target the United States add the languages that your customers speak I'm going to keep it as English under automatically created assets you can allow Google to automatically generate assets for your ads uh using the content from your lending Pages domain and ads first is your text here you have customization of your text and the final URL expansion you also have an option of for video enhancements which would allow Google to enhance videos by creating addition vertical and square versions as well as additional shorter versions if you have a a mature account that's consistently Gathering conversions I recommend using all those automatically created assets options including the final URL expansion this is a really powerful setting you just need to make sure to use this feature excluding some of your URLs you can exclude here specific urls or based on certain rules like URL contains and the idea here is to exclude pages that don't generate any value for your business or are not part of your user conversion journey to make sure that is not promoting those pages you should add them to this uh exclusion list here for this tutorial I can exclude all urls that contains any policy like privacy policy shipping policy whatever and maybe I want to exclude for example about us page so for this uh example I think this is fine once you've added your exact URLs or URL rules click apply this feature Works especially well if you have a large website with a lot of content on it but it's also important to monitor uh what landing pages your performance Max campaign is serving and I will make videos about it in the future so subscribe to the channel for more value on Google ads moving on you have more settings here um first you can add an ad schedule if you want to show your ads on specific days of the week or specific times of day uh I recommend living it on all day unless you have a specific business Reason to Run ad specific hours otherwise Google is going to optimize for most effective advertising times anyway uh other settings uh include start and end dates personally I don't set an add dat end date for my campaigns if I want to stop a campaign I simply pause it campaign URL options you can leave unchanged brand exclusions here you can exclude specific Brands so your ads won't appear in searches mentioning those brands some advertisers exclude their own brand name here if they have a segmented strategy like I mentioned in the beginning of this tutorial uh so unless you have this strategy where you're advertising for your brand terms in a separate campaign or if you've tested for example your competitors keywords and you've determined through testing that those keywords are unprofitable for you you can exclude them here otherwise I recommend leaving this empty especially if you're just starting out I think it's better to start Broad and then you can check your performance Max Search terms after the campaign is launched and you can add any brand exclusions later once you've set all your campaign settings click next then is your asset group creation and this is the perfect place to disc your performance Max campaign structure so here I created two performance Max structures that I would recommend based on your budget uh first of what you need to understand is that performance Max campaigns are divided into asset groups like search campaigns are divided into ad groups where you group keywords and your ads in a sort of similar fashion performance Max campaigns are divided into asset groups where where you provide your headlines descriptions long headlines image applicable to e-commerce businesses and where you provide your audience signals and this is how Google understands what type of audience you're trying to Target and is going to mix and match uh different headlines videos images products and show Those ads to these audiences that you've defined through those signals and on a campaign level this is where you define your budget and your Beating strategy and your Beating Target so if you're working with a smaller budget then what you want to do is consolidate your performance Max strategy into a single campaign because your goal should be to get 30 conversions every with less conversions but this is what you should aim to get and this is what you should base your strategy around around this goal if you're working with larger budget and you can afford uh splitting your conversions among multiple campaigns and all of them are going to get at least 30 conversions because you're spending so much then you can structure where you have just one asset group per campaign otherwise in a Consolidated structure you're going to have multiple asset groups into a single performance me in terms of how your going website uh navigation menu the categories that you have in in your website in my example when I'm advertising an apparel store I would have an asset group for jackets uh I would have an asset group for jeans I would have an asset group for shirts and I would provide different headlines images videos products and audience signals so that Google goes out and targets people who are interested in a jacket with a relevant language with a relevant product and all of those asset groups are going to share their learning under the same beating strategy if I was working with the into different campaigns like this because this way I have more control over budget and beating for each specific category product or service category because uh here as you can see I Define budget and beaing here and I have no control over where Google is actually going to spend this budget is it going to spend it on jackets or is it going to spend it on jeans whereas here uh in this structure I can define a specific budget to spend I can set different row as Target or Target CPA targets if for example I have different margins on different product or Services I would obviously see that you in addition if you're working with larger budget you can even set up a separate campaign for for your top margin products or services and have a separate budget and a separate beaing strategy and target for those you can also make a separate uh campaign for products or services on sale for example we have Black Friday coming up and if only a part of your product or service catalog are on sale you should aim to give extra visibility to those items on sale if you want to push them more so you can give them a little bit more loose Target a larger budget for Google to go out and push those products more and finally you can even set up a separate campaign for products that are getting low Impressions or low clicks for Google to spend on those products and hopefully capture some conversions and then Google would understand that those products are actually worth spending on and you can put them then back into your core campaigns and in theory Google should continue spending on those if you have a small product or service catalog and you don't need to use a different language to in the comments below this video I will do my best to answer all the questions now let's get back to the campaign creation uh so here first of all give your asset group a name in my case I'm going to create an asset group for leather dresses just because I have headlines descriptions and long headlights already done from a previous tutorial so I'm going to reuse those next you need to add your listing groups this is where you define a specific products that are going to go into your campaign here you can make a selection based on category brand item id condition product type or or custom labels so one of those attributes needs to be already prefilled in your feed for example in my in my example I would probably have a product type leather dresses and I would add it and you select it here and this is how I would make sure that Google is only showing Le dresses products in this asset group you can also if you have a small product catalog you can maybe just even do this individually by adding item IDs in this example I will just use all products then you need to add your final URL here then you need to add your assets I've seen in some accounts that before this step you have a a separate page of asset generation if you don't you can generate assets by using this feature here you need to add up to 15 headlines you also need to add five long headlines which will replace standard headlines in placements where there is enough space then you need to add up to five descriptions if you need help writing headlines you can download my 15 top converting Google ads headlines for free at advantag raw.com headlines next you can add up to 20 images Google may suggest images based on the URLs that you've shared you can also generate images with Google AI currently this feature doesn't support images of people or faces but it works quite well for certain product categories here you can describe what kind of images you want or in some accounts you can even upload referral images for Google to generate similar ones under more options you can select different aspect ratios if you hover over this question icon you can see different dimensions and file size guidelines I strongly recommend that you add all image formats to your campaigns to make sure that you have visibility on all available placements this means you need to have landscape images Square images and portrait images so for this example I will just add some old images from the old library for for this project if you click this pen icon you're actually able to crop your image and add different aspect ratios like this for example from one image I can add three aspect ratios like this once you added your 20 images click save and by the way I also recommend you to make sure that you're adding all available images descriptions long headlines headlines to make sure that you're giving Google enough asset combinations to work with this way you're maximizing Google's chances of finding a highly converting a combination of headlines descriptions images and so on next you can add up to five logos you need to make sure that you're adding at least one square logo and at least one one landscape logo so I will just add here and in different colors as well next enter your business name this may appear in the text of your ad next you should add up to five videos make sure your YouTube channel is linked to your Google ads account you can search YouTube by specific URL or or a keyword or add some videos from your asset library after adding your videos you need to add your site links you might already have some account level site link extensions if you don't you can add them here those links will be shown below your ads in some placements and as you can see they give your ads a little extra real estate so those links should be the pages that participate in the conversion journey of your customer or your lead maybe some high value pages that generate a lot of business for you you should add them here also add pages that your customers find helpful then you can add a specific call to action or you can leave it on automated and let Google decide personally recently I've been leaving it on automated under more asset types so you're able to add some assets like a promotion asset if you're running a sale or promotion on your website you should definitely add it as you can see it will also be shown here and if you have promo codes this is also where you can add extra visibility to your promo codes next your prices this is this is how it would look in an ad realistically you should only add the price assets if prices is something that is your competitive Advantage if you believe that your prices are more attractive than your competitors uh you should add it as you can see it also add adds extra real estate to your ads uh however if you have a custom pricing or if your prices are on a more high end you might consider not adding your prices at this step but I will add them any for this tutorial then your calls assets if your phone number is generating business and revenue for you you should also add it if your phone number isn't Genera customers or leads for you then don't add it then your structured Snippets of your product or service catalog those are not clickable links they will be just shown as text then your lead for this is a native Google Lead form if you're collecting leads you can do this on Google directly without having to take users to your website uh if you're collecting leads definitely try it out make sure that you're actually checking the leads that are coming in through this lead form but if you're not collecting leads then you can leave it empty under more options you have HTML 5 those are those banners that you might have seen on some websites if you have an HTML 5 file you can add it here but this is Advanced uh and for most adver most advertisers don't use it so you can skip it next is your display path this is what will be shown to users in your ad so for example you can write something like Florence jewelry.com sale uh and it would be shown here or you can highlight what you're selling in your asset group so I would put leather dresses and this way when a user sees my ad they understand that they're going to go on a highly relevant landing page you can also add a different final URL for mobile if you have a different one otherwise leave this unchecked next we're moving on to our audience signals uh this is where you tell Google who you want to Target start with your search themes these are words or phrases people use when searching for your products I recommend adding Search terms that have converted well in your search campaigns you can find this Search terms by going to your Search terms report in Google ads sorting by conversions and selecting a time frame that makes sense for your business for this tutorial I will just add three search themes but you can add up to 25 and if you have a lot of converting Search terms don't hesitate and don't be lazy add more if if you have data on this after that you'll want to add your first party data if you have a customer list including emails phone numbers or website visitors upload it to your Google ads account and you will be able to select it um here you can also create an audience on G4 and your G4 obviously also needs to be linked to your Google ads account and then you would be able to select this audience here this is particularly powerful if you can segment your customer list by a specific product or service category and adding relevant precise customer list to a relevant asset group in this example I would export emails only of people who have purchased leather dresses I would upload it to Google ads and I would give this list of people who only purchase leather dresses to this asset group and then Google will know really precisely who to Target who would be interested in products like that I'm trying to advertise under additional signals you can add any interests or demographics and here Google provides a lot of options uh including in Market audiences life events detailed demographics and more here I recommend just typing the keywords uh that describe your product or service and if you can find any relevant interests or audience here you should definitely add them or what I want to add here also if you are using observation audiences in your search or in your shopping campaigns and you've identified any specific audiences that are more likely to convert relative to general population then you can also add this audience as a signal here Additionally you can define specific demographics however I recommend being cautious about overly segmenting by demographics when you're just starting out I recommend letting Google figure out the best demographics for your campaign first allow the campaign to run collect a meaningful amount of data and then adjust based on the performance that you get usually Google is pretty accurate and is pretty pretty effective when it comes to demographics so I recommend leaving it on all demographics then give your audience a name following a good naming convention so you can reuse it in other campaigns later once this is done click next then you need to set your campaign budget Google is going to give you a few scenarios and a recommended budget and it's going to estimate how many weekly conversions it's expecting you going to get or you can set a custom budget your goal here would be to get 30 conversions every 30 days so in this example with 14 estimated weekly conversions I should be able to uh get there so once your budget is set click next the final step is campaign summary this is where you can double check your ping strategy campaign settings and asset groups and your asset group and when you're satisfied hit publish campaign if you're using multiple asset group structure as is shown here then after your campaign is published navigate to your campaign open it go to asset groups uh uh here you're going to see the asset group that you've created click Three Dots here and click duplicate this asset group then you need to give it a different name assign in different listing groups different final URL different assets and so on and so forth also very important to assign different signals to this new asset group as shown here and once you're done click save and like this by duplicating and changing the duplicate asset group this is how you're going to achieve this campaign structure alternatively if you're going with this campaign structure then what you need to do is navigate to campaigns find the campaign that you've just created select it click edit copy then deselect it and once this paste icon appears click paste and click paste and then once the C the duplicate campaign is created you need to go inside the duplicate campaign and adjust your asset group there and this is how you're going to achieve of this structure and that's it you've just set up a performance Max campaign from start to finish thanks for watching if you found this tutorial helpful don't forget to like And subscribe leave any questions you have in the comments I will do my best to answer all of them in the future videos I will dive deeper into strategies for optimizing your performance Max campaigns your merchant center feed and getting the most out of your Google ads campaigns thanks again so much for watching I'll see you in the next one