The Ultimate Guide to Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max, or Pmax campaigns, are really hot at the moment. With so many businesses getting on the bandwagon and swearing on their lives to their power, it may seem like Pmax campaigns have been around for years when they are barely a year old. Unveiled by Google in the fall of 2022, these ads are all marketers can talk about in recent months, yet many continue to put off their implementation for a lack of understanding. If you’re finally ready to get going and are keen to kick your Google Ads approach into high gear, our digital marketing service will show you the ropes. 

What is performance max anyway? 

Google ads traditionally have certain ad forms including shopping or search ads, which commonly target just a specific audience, channel, or group of people. Performance max steps in to turn this concept on its head, allowing internet marketing services to reach a variety of channels, including the two above, and others namely: 

  • Maps
  • Gmail
  • Discover
  • Display
  • YouTube 

At surface value, this might seem like a really great thing because this essentially means more reach for less work. However, there’s more to it than meets the eye, and this raises a few eyebrows for many experienced SEO marketing services providers. 

How do Performance Max campaigns work?

If you’re versed with Google’s Dynamic Search and Smart Shopping ads, then Pmax would somewhat be the result of these two coming together. The concept is modeled around the same dynamic search ad principle. Give Google a variety of information to work with, including

  • Videos
  • Images
  • Headlines
  • Feed
  • Product 

The search engine will then take care of the rest, mixing and matching to create varying ads according to the channel they make their way to. 

The lowdown on creating a Pmax Campaign from scratch

Performance max is a whole different ball game compared to other SEO services campaigns that we’re used to, and here’s a step-by-step guide to hold your hand from start to finish. 

  • Set a campaign objective: Fill your campaign-per-marketing goal, e.g. app promotion, website traffic, leads, sales, etc., or you could also decide not to define any objectives right away
  • Choose campaign type: You’ll see a bunch of options including local, smart, shopping, etc. Click the Performance Max option from the tiles
  • Set conversion objectives: The goals you set here will ultimately determine how your campaign is optimized so you want to keep a close eye on the goals selected. Hit the three dots at the end of each goal to remove if it’s tracking a non-essential metric, or if it’s a duplication
  • Bidding & budget: Google stipulates that your budget cannot be shared and that a daily budget period is mandatory. If you have no clue what exact figure to set, the search engine giant advises you shoot for an average daily budget that’s thrice your cost-per-conversion. 
  • Tweaking your campaign settings: Finetune your campaign to specific target language and locations. 
  • Final URL expansion: Here you’ll have two options, either allow google to automatically send traffic to relevant URLs or exclude certain URLs on your site. The latter is ideal if you’d like to take off the table pages such as your About Us section, which may not make for the best landing pages. 

Making asset Groups for your ads

At this point, you’ll need to define asset groups, and the first we’ll discuss is the listing group. Google automatically uses all of your feed’s products for your listing group, but if you’d like to change that, hit the pencil icon right next to “All products” under Listing Groups. 

The assets menu is not too indifferent to smart shopping ads as we know them. Feed Google different content materials and it will combine them to match placement factors. Then create assets you’ll need to specify including:

  • A minimum of 1 square logo
  • Although optional, you may include up to 5 YouTube videos if you please. Each video needs to last at least 10 seconds
  • 1 landscape and 1 square image
  • Between 2 and 5 description texts  
  • 1 to 5 long headlines
  • 3-5 regular headlines

You’ll want to stick more to the maximum numbers for your images, headlines, and descriptions so you can give Google a good depth of dimension to work with. If you’d like, you can rely on Google’s autofill suggestions for your text assets, which draw from your other ad details so you don’t have to create your text assets completely from the ground up. On the other hand, if you’d like to spice up your copy, a digital marketing Ohio agency can give your text assets that extra spark to stand out. 

Finally, select your audience signal so Google can leverage its machine learning abilities to get your ads in front of the right eyes.  

Rounding it all off with Extensions, and some killer tips for hitting the ground running

Before you can take your pMax campaign for a spin, you’ll need to add ad extensions. A few remain unavailable but some functional ones you can try when opportunity calls include:

  • Promo extensions
  • Structured Snippets
  • Call out extensions
  • Sites links, to name a few

Once you’ve added these, your campaign is clear for takeoff. But before that, our online marketing service serves up the following tips to help you get the most out of your pMax campaign: 

  • The more assets you use the better
  • For cross-device conversions or video view tracking, ditch GA conversions import. Instead, you’ll be better served by Google Ads conversion tracking
  • As far as image assets go, shoot for 5 variations and above. The same goes for text assets

Performance max campaigns verdict

Pmax campaigns are brimming with endless potential, but they can be a slow-burner. It may take up to 2 months for the AI algorithm to get enough data to better optimize your campaigns so don’t expect to see results right away like magic. With the right strategy, adjusting, and readjusting, performance max campaigns might just be what your business needs to truly get going. If you feel like you’re in over your head with Performance max campaigns, you’ll need an experienced partner to guide you. Before you type up digital marketing services near me, we’ll have you know our agency has tons of Pmax campaign experience and a proven track record.