Optimization tips for Performance Max campaign for all business types

Performance Max uses Google AI to help you drive growth in conversions and value through bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution. It's designed to perform across a wide range of marketing objectives and media channels. Because of this, we recommend using the following best practices to set up your Performance Max campaigns for optimal results.

This article explains best practices for all business types.

For additional best practices, review:

• Best practices for online sales (non-shopping)
• Best practices for lead generation
• Best practices for store goals
• Best practices for retail advertisers with online sales goals using a Merchant Center feed

Best practices for all business types

• Campaign duration and learning period: Run new campaigns for at least 6 weeks. This allows the machine learning algorithm to ramp up and gather sufficient data to optimize performance. Avoid making frequent changes to budget, bid strategy, or campaign status within this initial period, as this can reset the learning phase and cause performance fluctuations. If you make significant changes to an existing campaign, allow a similar learning period of 1-2 weeks (or at least one full conversion cycle) for the campaign to stabilize and re-optimize.
• Audience signal: Performance Max is powered by machine learning. Use relevant audience lists as signals to speed up the machine learning ramp-up and enhance your campaign’s results. Provide relevant and high-quality audience signals, like remarketing lists, custom intent, Customer Match lists, and similar segments. Regularly review and refine these signals to ensure they accurately guide the AI. Effective audience signals are crucial for guiding the campaign towards the right users and can significantly impact performance, especially if the campaign is underspending or not reaching the desired audience.
• Assets: Provide a diverse range of high-quality assets to maximize strength. Aim for “Excellent” or “Good” ad strength rating. Include at least 20 text assets (15 headlines, 5 descriptions), at least 7 image assets (3 landscape, 3 square, and 1 portrait), and at least 1 video asset. You can upload your own video or use the video creation tool. The use of your own video asset is particularly important if you want to minimize spend on auto-generated videos on YouTube. Stronger and more diverse assets help improve performance and can address issues like low conversions or high CPA. Learn more about how to Build an asset group.