This year we’ve launched a variety of features aimed at giving you more visibility and control in your Performance Max campaigns, including the launch of the highly anticipated channel performance report beta at Google Marketing Live. Your feedback has helped us make these improvements and we’re continuing to build on this momentum today with new launches:
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Reach your audience with new controls.
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Campaign-level negative keyword lists
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Increased search theme limits
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More demographic targeting
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Drive new customer growth with enhanced reporting and diagnostics.
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Improved new customer acquisition performance and reporting
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Diagnostics for goal-related issues
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Take action on new creative reporting and insights.
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Final URL expansion assets reporting
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New creative recommendations for channel performance
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Reach your audience with new controls
First, we're enhancing your ability to define who sees your ads and where they appear. Performance Max is designed to find performing Search traffic for your brand, so negative keywords aren’t always needed. But they can still be an important tool for ensuring your ads are brand suitable. Earlier in the year, we launched campaign-level negative keywords to all Performance Max campaigns, which apply to Search and Shopping inventory. To make this feature even more efficient, we’re adding the ability to apply campaign-level negative keyword lists to your Performance Max campaigns. This makes managing your exclusions across multiple campaigns much easier. For instance, a retailer selling luxury goods can use a single list to exclude terms like “cheap” or “bargain” and apply it to multiple campaigns at once. This ensures brand suitability without having to manually update negative keywords in each campaign. And of course, you can still add unique, campaign-specific negative keywords to individual campaigns.
Use campaign-level negative keyword lists to easily apply negative keywords across multiple Performance Max campaigns
On the other hand, if you want to expand your search results and meet your audience where they’re searching for you, we’ve increased the limit of how many search themes you can add from 25 search themes to 50 per asset group. This lets you grow your reach even more and unlock new, relevant traffic based on the information you provide about your business. And to see how your search terms are performing, you can now access search terms reporting for all Performance Max campaigns and through the API.
Beyond Search, if you want the ability to reach your audience more precisely, device and age targeting controls are now fully available in Performance Max campaigns. Device targeting gives you greater control over which device types their ads reach; for instance, a gaming company can target only compatible devices. And age-based demographic controls let you target the age range most relevant to your products, goals, and regulatory requirements. Finally, we’re launching a new beta for gender-based demographic controls.
Find new customers and bid more effectively with enhanced reporting and diagnostics
We’re making new customer acquisition reporting clearer in Performance Max, Search, and Shopping campaigns. Previously, when segmenting your lifecycle goals reporting by new vs. returning customers, you may have seen conversions labeled as “Unknown”. Now, you won’t see these “Unknown” conversions in reporting because we’ve improved our ability to estimate whether an “Unknown” customer is a new or existing customer. Not only are you getting a clearer understanding of who your new customers are, but this will also help you bid more effectively for them. We’re continuing to improve accuracy, and for more precise results, you can update your conversion tracking tag to include the new customer acquisition parameter.
To help you identify goal-related issues in your Performance Max campaign, we’ve added new diagnostics and recommendations based on the status of your campaign’s goal and conversion setup. These tools will guide you through resolving any identified issues, such as missing or broken tags, goals, and conversion actions that could be impacting the performance of your campaign.
Take action on new creative reporting and insights
We’ve been continuously improving Performance Max’s creative reporting capabilities throughout the year. We previously introduced more creative reporting, including full asset stats which are now available in all Performance Max campaigns. This lets you see conversions, cost, clicks, and more.
You’ve also asked for more control over assets served with final URL expansion, so we’re now adding reporting capabilities that make these assets viewable. This means you can now see all assets created with text customization and final URL expansion and you can also remove them if you no longer want them to run.
Use updated reporting to view assets that were served thanks to final URL expansion. You can also remove these assets as needed.*
Finally, you’ll start seeing recommendations that give you actionable insights to improve your image quality and drive better performance. You’ll get suggestions on the types of images to add and how to edit your existing ones, to perform better on different channels. These recommendations will link you directly to the AI-powered image editor in Google Ads so you can make these changes instantly.
New creative recommendations give you suggestions on how to improve your image quality and creative performance across different channels
From more precise audience reach and clearer new customer acquisition reporting to enhanced creative visibility and AI-powered recommendations, we're committed to helping drive stronger results. Dive in and explore how these updates can help you achieve your goals! And as always, thanks so much for your feedback and please keep it coming! We can’t wait to see how you’re using these tools and we look forward to hearing your feedback so we can continue to improve Performance Max.
Posted by Natalie Wertz, Group Product Manager, Google Ads
*The URLs, headlines, and descriptions in this UI mock are for illustrative purposes and are not meant to represent any existing business.
