About Performance Max campaigns

Performance Max campaigns: General concepts video

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Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. It's designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google's channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps.

Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimising performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max uses Google AI across bidding, budget optimisation, audiences, creatives, attribution and more. They're all empowered by your specific advertising objective, for example, if you have a CPA or ROAS target, and the creative assets, audience signals and optional data feeds that you provide.

Note: If you’re using Performance Max through Google Ad Grants, your campaign may not be eligible to serve on all inventory. New channels and inventory will come over time to help you drive results across all of Google.

Note: Performance Max will show as a campaign type to select if your advertising objective is 'Sales', 'Leads' or 'Local store visits and promotions'.

Benefits

Benefit 1, Unlock new audiences across Google's channels and networks.

Benefit 2, Drive better performance against your goals.

Benefit 3, Get more transparent insights.

Benefit 4, Steer automation with your campaign inputs.

Benefit 5, simplify campaign management and easily optimise your ads.

Performance MAX - unlock audiences icon Find more converting customers

You customise the goals that matter to your business and maximise conversions or conversion value.
Performance Max allows you to engage customers across Google's channels.
With Google’s real-time understanding of consumer intents and preferences, paired with your input using audience signals, Performance Max can unlock new customer segments that you may not have expected.

Performance MAX - better performance icon Drive more value

Data-driven attribution across channels optimises for the most incremental touchpoints that drive customers to conversion.
Google AI is used to make more accurate predictions about which ads, audiences and creative combinations perform best for you.

Performance MAX - insights icon Acquire rich insights

Performance Max asset reporting can help you to understand which creatives are impacting performance and help you to optimise campaign creatives to drive ROI.
New insights, such as rising search trends, can help you to understand changes in performance and inform your broader business strategy.

When to use it

Performance Max is the best option to use when:

You have specific advertising and conversion goals. For example, driving online sales, lead generation and others.
You want to maximise the performance of your campaign, and you aren't limited by which channel your ads appear on.
You want to easily access all of Google’s advertising channels using a single campaign.
You want to gain additional reach and conversion value beyond keyword-based Search campaigns.

Google AI

Google AI powers Performance Max to maximise your campaign’s performance. You add your unique expertise such as budget, business goals and conversions that you want to measure. Google AI will then find potential customers for your goals and serve the most appropriate ad, with the optimal bid, to maximise campaign performance.

Smart Bidding combined with attribution technology helps to determine the best options for your campaign across all Google inventory and to determine bids on the auctions that have the highest probability of meeting your business goals in real-time. Google AI is enhanced when you add audience signals to your Performance Max campaign.

Automatically created assets are a campaign-level setting that help you generate additional text assets. These assets will appear in campaign-level settings as accounts are added to the beta. Learn more about automatically created assets.

Note: If Final URL expansion is on, Google may replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on the user’s search query, and generate a dynamic headline, description and additional assets to match your landing page content. Learn more about automatically created assets.

Auto-generated videos are a campaign-level setting that help you generate additional video assets. These assets will appear in campaign-level settings. Learn more about video assets for Performance Max campaigns.

Note: Performance Max campaigns that use auto-generated videos may show customers who visit your landing page a different product than the one featured in your video. This difference may be caused when the product linked in your final URL doesn’t match the product in your campaign videos. If you’d like to restrict the landing page and ensure that the product a customer clicks is the product that they viewed, limit the products shown in your asset groups to the most relevant landing page using product filters.

Campaign inputs

Performance Max uses Google AI to optimise bids and placements to drive conversions or conversion value for your goals, but you can provide important inputs like audience signals, including your customer data and high quality text, images and video that can significantly improve your campaign performance. You can also provide important inputs about what types of conversions are most valuable to your business by applying conversion values and setting value rules. Account-level brand safety settings are also available so you can tell Google Ads about the types of content where you don’t want your ads to appear.

How Performance Max works with search campaigns and keywords

Performance Max complements existing search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting.
If the user’s query is identical to an exact match keyword in your search campaign, the search campaign will be prioritised over Performance Max.
Search themes have the same prioritisation as phrase match and broad-match keywords. Learn more about keyword prioritisation within a Google Ads account.
Your Performance Max campaign may sometimes show for branded keywords in your search campaign, even if those keywords are set to exact match (for example, if your search campaign is limited by budget or if the targeting is stricter). If this happens and you want to prevent this overlap, you can use brand exclusions within Performance Max or add those keywords as negative keywords in your Performance Max campaign.

For advertisers with online sales goals using a Merchant Center feed

Before you begin

Make sure that your Merchant Center account is set up with the required product information, such as business details, tax information (US only), a verified and claimed website, delivery settings, a feed with all your product information. Learn more about how to Sign up for Google Merchant Center.
Make sure that your Google Ads account is linked to your Merchant Center account. Learn more about how to Link a Google Ads account to Merchant Center.

Note: Advertisers with a Merchant Center feed don't need to supply any creative assets to launch a Performance Max campaign. However, we do recommend that you provide creative assets to allow your campaign to serve maximally across surfaces and have optimal performance. Ads may be auto-generated on your behalf.

How to integrate with third-party platforms:

Note:

You can create up to 100 Performance Max campaigns in your Google Ads account. For the best performance, we recommend consolidating your Performance Max campaigns where possible.
In Europe, Performance Max campaigns can be used with any Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) that you work with. The ads show on general search results pages and on any other surfaces that the CSS has opted in to.

For advertisers with store goals

Here are some reminders for advertisers with store goals:

Any advertiser with store goals and local contacts or directions set up as a conversion goal can create a Performance Max campaign.
Advertisers who formerly used Local campaigns can continue optimising to offline goals using Performance Max campaigns with no additional budget or inventory required.

For advertisers with travel goals

Performance Max for travel goals campaigns is the easiest way for hotel performance advertisers to serve across all Google properties. This allows advertisers to easily create property-specific asset groups and maximise their performance with Google Ads.

Learn more About Performance Max for travel goals.

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