How Performance Max Could Enhance Your Marketing Strategy

What is a Performance Max Campaign?

The landscape of paid search and social marketing is ever changing, as platforms develop their offerings to enhance user experience and ad performance. One of the latest and largest developments comes from Google, inviting its users to implement a new goal-based campaign type — Performance Max.

As the name would suggest, the campaign is designed to help you to discover more converting customers across all Google channels. This new offering is led by automation, primed for both performance and ease of use. Performance Max uses Google’s automation technologies across bidding, audiences, attribution and budget optimisation, to name a few, and these are tailored to your own advertising objective.

How does it work?

Performance Max campaigns are automated, but as ever, you, the advertiser, are in the driver’s seat. It’s up to you to select your objective, set your budget and bidding strategy, and choose locations, language and ad scheduling. After this, you need to create asset groups, which are essentially the ads that will be delivered across all of Google’s platforms — text, images, videos, Shopping feeds, etc.

The campaign will automatically create ads based on what the system believes will perform best against the campaign objectives that you set. Google will place them across Search, Discovery, YouTube, etc.

A key difference between Performance Max and other search campaigns is that there are no ad groups, since each campaign has just one targeting set. It is possible to specify audiences to inform Google who to target, however, Google claims that the campaign will also “unlock new customer segments you may not have expected”. Effectively it’s a smart campaign format that promises to tap into unrealised ad potential.

Let’s find out how it performs.

Are campaigns performing to the max?

Over the last month, we’ve launched a Performance Max campaign in a number of accounts and the results so far have been pretty impressive.

In a key finance account, Performance Max has delivered an improved click through rate (CTR) of 1.42%, exceeding the account average of 1.14%. Additionally, cost per click (CPC) has fallen below the account’s average of £1.60 at mean cost of £1.43. Overall, Performance max has outperformed all of the other campaign types that are currently running in the account, apart from its branded Search campaign.

Not only has Performance Max delivered in terms of results, it has also fulfilled its promise to “unlock new customer segments”. The campaign has been delivered to audiences that were previously untapped and has reaped conversions from these customer segments.

How to get the most out of Performance Max campaigns

As a relatively new campaign type, best practices for Performance Max will gradually emerge as more marketers begin to implement them into their strategy.

To help you to get started, Google recommends that you allow “the campaign to automatically prioritise the types of conversions that are most important to your business” and use an “appropriate budget that allows optimal results”.

Because of the smart nature of Performance Max, the campaign best performs when you provide it with a multitude of assets, since it can intuitively create combinations that are most likely to produce conversions. So, figure out which conversions are most valuable to your business and gather your most powerful assets. You can then take advantage of all that the newest campaign on the block has to offer.

Looking for support with Performance Max? Take a look at our paid search & social services or contact us for help.