6 Best Practices to Make Your Performance Max Campaigns Shine
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Imagine this—you’re searching for a new pair of running shoes, and within minutes, you see ads for the exact brands and styles you were considering across YouTube, Gmail, Search, and even your favourite apps. That’s the magic of Google Performance Max (PMax) campaigns in action!
For digital marketers, PMax is the new frontier of advertising, using Google’s AI-driven automation to optimize campaigns across multiple channels. Since its launch, it has sparked both excitement and confusion. What makes it different? How do you make the most of it? And with Smart Shopping and Local campaigns merging into PMax, understanding its power is more important than ever.
If you want to unlock the full potential of PMax and drive higher conversions, better ROI, and smarter ad placements, you’re in the right place.
Here are six best practices to make your campaigns shine!
What is a performance max campaign in the first place?
Imagine an all-in-one campaign meant to display ads across every single channel available on Google, like YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Shopping, Display, Search, Discover feed, etc. The most striking difference you would notice in a PMax campaign is its structure. In a performance max campaign, Ad Groups are called Asset Groups and Product Groups become Listing Groups. We already know that PMax is ideal for e-commerce and lead generation, so anyone who has used smart shopping in the past can take their efforts to the next level with PMax.
Now that you have understood the basics of a performance max campaign, let us get into the best practises for its proper optimisation without wasting any time;
- Branching out the campaign focus
The overall focus of your performance max campaign needs to be branched out as much as possible for ideal results. Those who have tested this theory with PMax campaigns say that using a number of different foci can bring positive results. Once you feed the campaign the correct assets, then it does not matter if you use a full website focus or a specific product focus, the campaign will end up generating higher returns.
2. Using audience signals (custom/segments)
A lot of people would tell you that using custom audiences/segments and “your data” is not really an optimisation tip. That could be true considering that this should be the foundation of any performance max campaign. Once you begin feeding your PMax campaign with either one or both Custom Audiences/Segments and Your Data, it will offer you a starting point to create new conversions across Google and make your campaign perform faster.
3. Testing the Ad scheduling
Ad scheduling should be on your to-do list if you are interested in optimising PMax campaigns properly. With the help of ad scheduling, one can make sure that their ads are served whenever they are getting results as well. To do this, go to your calendar view and check if there is anything pointing out to a low return for ad spend for any of your performance max campaigns. If you see a pattern, then go ahead and edit “ad schedule”.
4. Ensuring a full group of assets
Having a full group of assets in your performance max campaign goes a long way in aiding Google to optimise all of the campaign ads by seeing that every asset is relevant and significant. Make sure to check that the ad copy, videos, and even images are always relevant to your business, campaign, and some other assets. Otherwise, the ads you have created will end up losing their credibility all at once.
5. Adding some useful extensions
You may have never been able to add extensions to other ad types, but it is not only possible but also recommended in PMax campaigns. As the creator and handler of the campaign, you need to choose only those extensions that are suitable for all assets. Once that is out of the way, Google Machine Learning will end up picking what selection of assets and associated extensions will be served with them.
6. Reviewing assets performance
In the menu section, under the option of “Asset Groups”, you get to review the performance of each of the selected assets. It is important to keep an eye on asset performance to see how Google has ranked each of the assets and what can be done to improve that. There are basically 5 kinds of performance shown in the asset table, which are low, good, best, learning, or pending.
If you find performance max campaigns hard and optimising them even harder, then try the aforementioned best practises the next time you’re at it.
