Performance Max FULL Tutorial & Campaign Setup (Google Ads)

Key Takeaways

Performance Max campaigns have evolved into one of the most important campaign types for successful Google Ads advertisers. Google even officially designates the combination of search and performance max campaigns as their power pair due to their effectiveness when used together. It hands down delivers the strongest conversion performance and ROI across all of Google. So, in this video, I will cover everything you need to know about Performance Max campaigns. What they are, how they work, when you should use them, and most importantly, how to set them up correctly. If you're here just for the technical setup process, feel free to skip ahead to this time code. However, before diving into the technical setup procedure, let's start by understanding what Performance Max campaign actually is and when you should use it for your business. Understanding Performance Max, the fundamentals. The core idea behind Performance Max is simple. Leverage Google's machine learning to automatically optimize ad delivery across all Google's networks while simplifying campaign management for advertisers. You provide Google with advertising assets such as headlines, descriptions, products, images, videos alongside your audience signals. Google's AI then takes over, dynamically matching optimal asset combinations with the right uh people across all advertising channels at precisely the right moment in their customer journey. This approach drives powerful results, but does require relinquishing some granular control over ad delivery specifics. Prior to performance max, you had to create and manage separate campaigns for each Google's uh advertising channel, search display, YouTube shopping. This fragmented approach often resulted in disconnected strategies, redundant work, mis opportunities for cross channel optimization and so on and so on. Smart shopping and local campaigns were early attempts to automate across channels, but performance max took this concept much further. Google themselves reported an average 13% increase in conversion value at the same or better return on ad spend compared to standard campaigns across same channels. So when should you use performance max campaigns? Performance max campaigns are heavily dependent on the quality of your audience signals and your conversion data. Therefore, for optimal results, it's recommended to implement performance max after establishing a solid baseline with your search and shopping campaigns. Recommended prerequisites before launching uh a performance max campaign are number one, established search campaign performance. Meaning you need to maintain a profitable search campaign that has been actively running for a minimum of 30 or preferably 60 days to generate sufficient baseline conversion data for your performance max campaign to use. Number two, adequate conversion volume. Accumulate at least 30 conversions within your account over the last 30 days. This will provide Google's algorithm with enough meaningful data to optimize effectively towards uh your business goals. Number three, take advantage of observation audiences. While running your existing search and shopping campaigns, add observation audiences to them. This important step will help you find converting audiences which you can later leverage uh when configuring your performance max campaign audience signals. Number four, upload your customer match list to Google Ads and create a purchase audience on G4 as well so that you can add them as signals to your Performance Max campaign as well. Okay, with these fundamentals out of the way, let's now create your Performance Max campaign. So, 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 it will guide you through the setup process. If you prefer, you can create a campaign without objective guidance, but personally, I find it useful. For this tutorial, I'm going to select sales. If you're focused on leads, you can choose uh that instead. Also, uh I've uh tested performance max campaigns for uh local store visits and promotions. So, you can try this objective as well if it fits uh your business objective. After selecting your objective, add your conversion goal. If you choose sales like me, your conversion goal will likely 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 goals yet, you can go to YouTube and search for Google Ads conversion goals along with your website platform name to find a 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. Uh for this tutorial, we're we're choosing performance max. After choosing performance max, uh a window uh will pop up asking if you want to connect uh a merchant center account. This is important if you're running an e-commerce store. If you're not in e-commerce, you don't need to link a Merchant Center account, so you can skip this part. If you are in e-commerce, select your Merchant Center account, which must be linked to your Google Ads account beforehand. You also need to ensure that your products are uploaded and approved in your Merchant Center account. I will make a separate video about how to do all those things in the future. So, subscribe to the channel for more valuable videos about Google Ads. But if you don't have a Merchant Center uh account yet, you can uh just skip this step for now and uh add it later for the tutorial. I'm going to include it. If you want to select a specific feed from your account, you can choose a feed with a specific feed label. For uh this tutorial, I'm going to use all products that I have in this Merchant Center account. Now, next, choose a campaign name. I recommend using a consistent naming convention as I always uh emphasize in my videos. A good naming convention will help you keep your account organized. For this tutorial, I will be making a Performance Max campaign for a fictional jewelry brand. So, I will name this campaign performance max earrings. So, enter your campaign name and click continue. Next, you need to set your bidding strategy. With performance max campaigns, you have uh two options, conversions or conversion value. If you're in e-commerce and are tracking the value of your conversions, I recommend focusing on conversion value. If you're not tracking the value of your of your conversions, like for example, when you're collecting leads and treating all leads the same, then you can choose conversions. You can also add a target cost per action uh target CPA for conversions or uh target return on ad spend for conversion value by checking this uh box and you can add the target rows or target CPA uh here. However, when launching a new campaign, I recommend leaving this unchecked initially. Allow your campaign to run until it's consistently getting 30 conversions every 30 days. Then, based on your rorowes or your actual CPA, you can set your target rorowes or your target CPA. Next is the customer acquisition section. By default, Performance Max campaigns bid equally for new and existing customers. If you check the option, you can u make your campaigns bid higher for new customers or even bid exclusively for new customers. There are um a few cases when I recommend using this option. For example, if you have a segmented performance max strategy where one campaign is for acquiring new customers with a separate uh acquisition budget and you're advertising to existing customers with other campaigns. Another case is when you're generating leads or capturing emails and you don't want to keep advertising to people who are already on your email list. So if this is the case for you, you can choose to only bid uh for new customers. And in this case, your campaign will be limited to only new customers regardless of your bid strategy. However, in the majority of cases, I recommend leaving this unchecked, especially if you're running an e-commerce store, as repeat purchases can generate a lot of value. If you bid only for new customers, you'll be limiting yourself to those who haven't purchased uh from you before. So, after uh you decided on your customer acquisition setting, click next. After bidding comes the campaign settings section. First is location. You can target uh by countries, territories, cities, or even set a radius around a specific location. For example, you can set a 20 mile radius around your restaurant. You can also exclude locations if it makes sense for your business. For this tutorial, I will target the United States. Next, add the languages your customers speak. I'm going to keep it as English. Under more settings, you have a few additional options. First, you can add an ad schedule uh to show your ads on specific days or specific times of day. For most businesses, I recommend leaving this on all days. The only time I would recommend setting specific schedules is if you're promoting um maybe phone calls during business hours or offering some time-sensitive service. uh then uh you can go ahead and add your ad schedule here. Otherwise, uh leave it on all days. Other settings include start and end dates. Personally, I never set an end date for campaigns. If I want to stop a campaign, I just simply pause it. Campaign URL options, you can leave this unchanged. Campaign URL options let you add additional tracking parameters like UTM tags to your ad URLs, enabling a more granular analysis of where your traffic is coming from. This is an advanced feature and it's useful for advertisers who need custom tracking or some sort of integration with third-party analytics beyond Google Ads default autotagging setup. Uh so for most advertisers uh the standard tracking parameters provided by Google ads are sufficient making these extra options generally unnecessary. So you can skip this section and brand exclusions. Here you can add specific um brands to exclude so your ads won't appear in searches mentioning those brands. I recommend leaving this option empty unless you have a a specific strategy for excluding uh competitors or you know from data that certain competitor names don't generate results for you then go ahead and add it. But if you don't have such data, I recommend not uh limiting your campaign in this way as uh you never know maybe this campaign would be able to find a competitor brand name for you uh to target that would be profitable. So once you adjusted all your campaign settings, click next. Next, we're moving on to audience signals. This is where you tell Google who you want to target. Starting with search themes, which are basically words and phrases people use when uh searching for your products. And before we continue with defining your audience signals, I wanted to briefly discuss the campaign structure for your performance max campaigns because this is really important. Uh before you decide what audience signals uh you define, let me quickly explain you the structure that I recommend you follow in your performance max campaigns. So I've created a diagram, a simple diagram here on miro. At the top you have your performance max campaign. This is uh basically like a container that defines uh your bidding, your budget and certain settings like languages, locations uh and so on. And each performance max campaign is broken down into one or more asset groups. So you think of a performance max campaign as a container for your asset groups and at the container level you're defining some broad settings whereas on the asset group level you're providing Google first of all with assets which are your headlines, descriptions, images and so on. you're providing your products if you're in e-commerce. If you're in services, you're going to skip it. But by using listing groups, you're also providing certain products for each asset group. And finally, you're also providing signals. In signals, you're basically defining who you want Google to reach. Whereas in assets and products, you're telling Google what you want Google to show to people. what is your ad message and what are your products that you're presenting? And I also added a couple of tips uh here. So tip one, consolidate asset groups that share the same bidding target in the same performance max campaign. So if you have multiple types or categories of products uh and services that have the same margins or for example that share the same ad budget and approximately the same unit economics, then you can put them in the same campaign and allow them to share the same budget, the same bidding strategy. And in this way, you're going to share optimization and learning among more product categor product or service categories. Also, it will help you reach the recommended 30 conversions uh over the last 30 days for upgrading to target rorowes or target CPA bidding strategies. But my tip is for you to aim to upgrade to those bidding strategies as soon as possible. Target rorowes and target CPA are truly the most superior bidding strategies especially for performance max campaigns at the moment because these bidding strategies allow Google to go beyond your budget when Google believes that it can capture additional value. So if you're using strategies that have a a fixed budget like maximize conversion value or maximize conversions where Google is not allowed to go beyond that budget, Google will not be able to capture new opportunity that might have become available. And for the asset group level, uh my tip is to organize your asset groups around your product or service categories. Often this is going to follow your website navigation menu and the logic is that this allows you to provide relevant ad messaging, relevant products and relevant targeting in this structure for Google to go out and effectively reach the audiences that you want to reach with the right messaging and relevant products. So in my case, if I'm creating a performance max campaign for earrings, my asset group one could be stud earrings for example, where I'm going to provide ad messaging specific to stud earrings. I'm also going to show only stud earrings products specifically. And in my signals, I've already provided search themes and um custom segment with stud earrings searches specifically. Asset group two, for example, could be for gold earrings. Asset group three could be for diamond or gemstone earrings and so on and so forth. And if you have just one product or service uh category, it's okay to have just one asset group as well. And I have personally uh worked with Performance Max campaigns who have up to 15 or 20 asset groups. So uh you can really add as many as you want depending on availability of course of assets and products. So, the idea of your audience signals and uh your assets that we're going to set up uh later in this tutorial is that your audience signals and your assets, meaning your headlines, long headlines, descriptions, images, and so on, are all relevant, tightly, neatly grouped and organized around certain themes so that You tell Google exactly what type of audience you want Google to reach and you provide highly relevant targeted assets for Google to present to uh this audience. And this is the structure that is currently working best for performance max campaigns. So when you're first creating your performance max campaign and you reach this signals stage, you are essentially creating um audience signals for one of uh your many asset groups. So for uh in my example, if my campaign is for earrings and let's say I planned uh to make um a campaign with five asset groups and I already prepared those assets in at this campaign setup step, I would add signals for one of those asset groups. For example, for stud earrings. So under search themes, you need to add words and or phrases people use when searching for your products. If you have uh such data, I recommend adding search terms that have previously converted well in your search campaigns in the past. You can find these search terms by going to your search terms report in Google ads, sourcing by conversions and selecting a time frame that makes sense. If you don't have such data, you can uh use uh Google keyword planner to come up with uh search term ideas. After you've added your search themes, you can add your audience signals. First of all, you can add any of the saved signals that you have in your account or you can create a new one by first of all adding your first party data. Meaning if you have a customer list including your customers emails, phone numbers or uh even website visitor audiences from J4. This is particularly powerful if you can segment your customer list by purchase history and um create an audience of customers who've previously purchased a specific product or service category that you're targeting in this asset group. For example, in my case, it would be amazing to create a specific customer match list of people who purchased earrings specifically or stud earrings specifically. Under additional signals, you can add interests, detailed demographics or life events related to your customers. By clicking browse, you can see how Google segments different types of audience or you can just type directly different keywords related to your product or service and check what audiences and interests Google might have for you. So in my case, I would type earrings. I would add earrings, gold jewelry for example, and gemstone jewelry. After you've added your interests and detailed demographics here, if you want to go even further or in case if you couldn't find any relevant interests, detailed demographics or life events for your product or service, what you can do is add a new custom segment which is basically a custom interest. So give it a name. For this tutorial, I will name it test interest. In here, you're given an option to include people with the following interests or purchase intentions. What you can do here at the bare minimum is just duplicating your search themes as your interests and purchase intentions. If you want to go a bit further, you can also explore interest or purchase intentions ideas that Google is giving you below here when you start typing. So you can easily also add uh some additional interests based on Google suggestions. You can expand your custom segment even further by adding certain types of websites or use uh certain apps or apps similar to those apps. So if you know for example a competitor with which you know you have a significant audience overlap, you can add them here. So for this tutorial I'm going to add Tiffany. Then click save. This notification uh just shows that uh the your new custom segment is under review. Next you can define your demographics specifically you can set gender, age or under additional demographics you can also choose a certain parental status or in certain markets even household income. If you have uh this uh data in your business or in your Google account history that you know that for this asset group certain demographics significantly outperforms then you can go ahead and set it. If you don't have this data, for example, if you're starting out or if your demographics are often more mixed, then I strongly recommend keeping it on all demographics and allowing Google to find the most profitable demographics for you. And later on, if you want, you can limit your demographics at a later point. Then you can add your audience name in order to save it to your audience library so that you can use it later. So I'm going to name it test audience for this tutorial. After you've given it a name, click next. The next step is asset generation. And this is a relatively new feature. As you can see, it is still in beta. Basically, you can let Google AI help you generate your ad assets. Essentially, you tell Google about your campaign and it will generate headlines and descriptions for you. At the moment, I don't find it particularly strong, but the quality of results really depends on how much information you provide and the quality of that information. Of course, to use this feature, you first need to share your final URL. Then you'll be asked questions like what products or services are you advertising in this campaign? What makes your products or services unique? And you also can select uh certain pages to enhance and suggest uh images for your campaign. You can test this feature out by clicking generate assets. But for this tutorial, I'm going to skip asset generation part and I'm going to write new assets from scratch. But you can change headlines in descriptions later anyway. So it really doesn't hurt for you to uh test generate assets if you want. Now we finally arrived at the asset group step. I'm going to call this asset group stud earrings. under the listing groups. This is where you add your products. Listing groups uh is basically a way uh for you to group products on your Merchant Center account. You have an option to select products by category, brand, item IDs, condition, product type, channel, and uh custom labels. Of course, you need to have those predefined and uh preset in your Merchant Center account. So, go ahead uh and depending on whatever your merchant center account structure is, select the relevant product type. For example, so I'm going to select stud earrings product type and click save. And in this way, I'm making sure that for my audience signals, I'm only going to be showing specifically relevant products. In my case, being stud earrings. Next, your assets. So, first of all, add your final URL. Often, it's going to be prefilled for you. Next are your headlines. If you need help writing your headlines, uh, I recommend watching this video. I also created a list of my top 10 irresistible Google Ads headlines that you can use for Performance Max campaigns as well. If you want to get this list for free, you can uh follow the link that I will add to the description of this video. But to make long story short, keep your headlines brief and punchy. Obviously, they need to be within 30 characters. Think of them as your hook in each headline. Focus on a single compelling selling point. Use strong, clear language that immediately communicates the value of what you're uh selling. Lead with your benefits, uh your selling points, maybe any competitive advantages that you might have. And of course, keep your headlines relevant to the actual search themes that you have provided Google in the signals section of this tutorial. Long headlines allow you a bit more room to tell uh your story. The long headlines will appear instead of your short headlines in a certain larger ad spaces. They can be up to 90 characters. Remember that they can appear without your descriptions. So when writing your long headlines, you need to make sure that you make them into single complete ad messages that can be just shown alongside your images or your products and that would make immediate sense uh to people what are you selling and what are you offering. Next are your descriptions which are added through the headlines and are meant to provide additional context to your headlines. They can also be up to 90 characters even though the first description uh has to be up to 60 characters. In some placements your description is going to be shortened uh or cut. So, I recommend again to lead with your strongest benefits or selling points or calls to action and write them so that they work and make sense together with your headlines. Next, you can add up to 20 images. Google may suggest images based on the URLs that you have 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 click the plus icon here to upload your own images as reference. If you hover over the question icon here, you will see Google's recommended image dimensions and file requirements. There are three supported image dimensions and I recommend using all of them to ensure your ads are shown in all available placements. Make sure that the images that you're adding look aesthetically pleasing and that they make it immediately obvious what you're offering, what value proposition your product or service delivers. And of course, make sure to keep your images relevant to the signals that you have shared with Google for this specific asset group. So, after you've added your images, click save. You can also add up to five logos in two formats, square and landscape. Again, I strongly recommend using both formats. If you have a logo in white and black, for example, add both. so that Google can optimize certain logos for specific uh ad placements depending on which color fits best. So if you have logos in different color schemes, add them. Next, add your business name. Sometimes this is going to be prefilled for you by Google. Next, you can add up to five videos. For this, you need to make sure that your YouTube channel is linked to your Google Ads account. And if so, you can search on YouTube by entering a URL or specific keyword or channel or you can uh select videos from your library or you can upload a video, but I believe that it's also going to be published on YouTube uh if you upload it. So, go ahead and add relevant videos if you have any. After you've added your videos, it's time to add your site links. You might already have some account level site links uh set up here. But if you don't add your site links asset uh here, this will appear as additional links in your ads. It's generally a good idea to add site links for pages that are part of the conversion journey or that generate uh some value for your business or that might answer frequent questions or maybe address a frequent obstacles uh for your audience. And this way uh people who see your ad would be able to quickly navigate to this page. After you've added site links, you can select a specific call to action such as shop now, apply now, book now, and so on. Or you can uh keep it on automated, which will allow Google to select the most relevant call to action for you. If you're working with a brand new account, I recommend actually selecting a manual call to action that makes sense for this asset group. However, if you're using a mature account, you can leave it on automated since Google will have a better understanding what call to action works best for your customers. Next step is additional asset types. Here you can add more assets uh to your performance max ads. First is your promotion extension. If you're running a sale at this promotion extension and it's going to be shown as a promotional message beneath your ad. Next is your price asset. If your pricing model is not custom, you can add price assets for your product or service categories. And this will give your ads extra real estate and improve your click-through rates. Next is call assets. If your phone calls generate revenue or leads for your business, add a phone number here to your campaign. If not, you can skip it. A message asset basically allows people to quickly open a messaging app and to message you. Again, if uh messaging uh drives results for you in your business, add it. Otherwise, feel free to skip it. Next are your callouts assets. These show additional non-clickable text about your business, product or service. So here you can add in unique or noteworthy aspects about your product or service that could be of interest to your customers. But again keep in mind that callouts are nonclickable. Next are your structured snippets. This can be used to highlight the range of your product or services. So if you offer multiple product types or service categories, structured snippets give your ads more visibility. And finally, you have an option to add lead forms and these help you capture leads directly on Google. If you're gathering leads, make sure to add uh a lead form here and make sure that you're actually checking leads that you're receiving from lead forms on Google. Under more options, you can add HTML 5 ads. Those are advanced interactive banners. You might have seen on some websites. This is advanced and really usually this would require you to hire an agency to help you uh make uh those ads. If you don't have an HTML 5 file, just skip it. Next is your display path. This is not the final URL where your users will land, but it's the URL that is going to be seen in your ad by your customers. So, keep it short and relevant, perhaps highlighting your product or service or promoting a sale. If you leave it empty, your display path will just be your website URL. So here I can add in my example stud earrings again to show that when people click on my ad they will go to the right place. You can also add a different final URL for mobile but usually advertisers use the same URL for mobile and desktop and tablet. If you have a different URL you have an option to use a different one for mobile. Lastly, you have URL options and URL rules. Asset group URL option is uh for tracking templates and this is really unnecessary. Uh you can skip this part. And under URL rules, you have an option to specify which URLs from your website Google should use in your ads. If you don't set any URL rules, Google will follow the URL expansion rules that were set up earlier in the campaign. And in order to use it, you need to turn on text assets in automatically created assets, which you can do right here below. So, as you can see, after I have unchecked text here and checked it again, uh I am now able to set URL rules. This can be especially useful if you're not an e-commerce site and you didn't define any listing groups. Next is your asset optimization. And this section will allow Google to increase asset variety and better match customer intent basically by using texts from your website, landing pages, ads, and provided assets uh in your account. If you check this option, you can also select final URL expansion. It's explained a little bit confusingly here, but basically if you check this option, then you will allow Google to go beyond the products that you have provided in your listing groups. It will go beyond your final URL. It will test different landing pages trying to match your landing page with a customer intent automatically. If you're using final URL expansion, make sure to exclude some URLs from your asset groups. Specifically, the URLs that are not a part of your customers conversion journey. For example, your about us page or your privacy policy page and so on and so forth. Generally speaking, Google understands the intent behind different web pages. But if you're using final URL expansion, it's a good practice to exclude those URLs that don't generate any real value for your business when it comes to generating revenue. Next are video enhancements, which allow Google to enhance your uploaded videos by creating different versions like um vertical or square that would better fit uh certain placements. I believe that it also shortens uh longer videos. Again, if Google believes that this will improve performance, I recommend you using the enhancement uh feature, especially if you don't have videos in different uh versions uh for different placements. But if you have taken time to design your ad creative specifically for different placements and you have a very thoughtout uh video uh creative and strategy, then you can uncheck it. After you're done setting up your asset group, click next. Now it's time to define your budget. The ideal target is to get 30 conversions every 30 days. So, I recommend choosing a budget that's large enough for you to get about one conversion every day. That's the ideal scenario. I understand that it's not realistic for some businesses. So, make sure that of course the budget also makes business sense for you. But of course, in the ideal world, you should be aiming for those 30 conversions every 30 days. But of course, you can be profitable and successful with less uh conversions. And it really depends on the market, um on the industry, and so on and so forth. For this tutorial, I'm just going to keep the budget at whatever Google has given me as the recommended budget for this campaign. So, after you've selected your budget, click next. Finally is your campaign summary step. Here you can uh quickly check your campaign settings, bidding, signals, and so on. And after you're done, click publish campaign. Now, in order for you to follow this campaign structure that we have uh discussed, navigate uh to the campaign that you have just uh created. Go to campaigns, asset groups. Uh here by selecting those three dots, you can click duplicate this asset group. And here you're going to again go through the step of asset group creation starting with asset generation then your asset group name listing groups and assets. So in order to follow this structure here you would add new headlines descriptions images relevant to the second asset group. In my case that could be gold earrings not stud earrings. You should also select relevant products via uh listing groups and of course provide relevant targeting signals for Google to reach relevant audiences and rinse and repeat this process until you have created a campaign that follows this structure that you have planned for you for your campaign. If you don't have a planned structure, I just recommend following your website navigation menu, which usually is broken down into product or service categories and subcategories. And remember, of course, about those uh consolidation tips that performance max campaign shares the same bidding and budget. So, also keep this in mind. And that's it. Your performance max campaign is ready. Uh, subscribe to the channel for upcoming video about how to optimize uh your performance max campaigns. For now, this is it. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you found this video helpful and I will see you in the next