Performance Max uses Google AI to boost your conversions and value by handling bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution. This ensures your ads show up at the right time for the right audience, making them more effective. Performance Max utilizes Smart Bidding to continuously optimize performance across all Google platforms, ensuring more conversions and increased value aligned with your objectives. To set up your Performance Max campaigns for online sales, consider these tips for success.
Here are some top tips for all types of businesses:
- Campaign Duration: Let your campaigns run for at least 6 weeks. This gives the machine learning algorithm enough time to learn and gather data for better performance.
- Audience Targeting: Utilize relevant audience lists to help the machine learning process and improve campaign results. Consider using remarketing lists, custom intent, Customer Match, and similar audience segments.
- Assets: Include a variety of assets in your campaigns. Aim for at least 20 text assets (with 15 headlines and 5 descriptions), 7 image assets (including 3 landscape, 3 square, and 1 portrait image), and at least 1 video asset. You can either use your own video or create one using the video creation tool available during campaign setup.
- Effective Creativity: Your creative content is vital for driving results and tailoring your campaign to showcase new products or offers. Aim for original and engaging content to maximize impact.
- Patience in Performance: Allow time for your assets to reach their full potential. Wait 3-4 weeks to gather performance data and insights before adjusting your creative mix.
- Asset Maintenance: Regularly monitor your asset ratings, ideally once per quarter, and update any outdated or underperforming assets. Consider replacing low-rated assets after 3-4 weeks, but avoid making frequent changes to maintain consistent performance.
- Timing for Sales: Initiate your campaign 2-3 weeks ahead of time and regularly update your creative content to transition from general store promotions to sales-oriented content. This approach allows for time-sensitive promotions without compromising effectiveness.
- Assessing Ad Strength: To evaluate ad strength, navigate to the Ads section under the 'Campaign' dropdown in the left-side page menu. Look for the 'Ad strength' column, which rates ads from 'Poor' to 'Excellent'. Use this indicator to assess the effectiveness of your asset group setup.
- Separate Campaigns: If you have specific products you want to focus on, make a separate Performance Max campaign for each type (like one for holiday stuff, another for high-profit items, and one for everything else). Lowering the target ROAS can help these products get more attention before busy times.
- Maximize Conversion: Begin with the maximize conversion value strategy (without a ROAS target) to have a shorter learning time, especially if you're starting a new Performance Max campaign from scratch.
- Adding Ad Extensions: As you set up your assets, remember to add ad extensions. Treat these extensions like you do in search campaigns, ensuring they're relevant to the campaign and its asset combinations
- Improve Your Feed: When organizing asset groups, focus on enhancing your product feed. Ensure that products in each group align with the assets. If your assets are categorized by content, match products in each asset group accordingly. Product titles should clearly describe the product to maintain a high click-through rate. If any titles are unclear, it could lead to fewer clicks.If certain products consistently yield low ROI, consider excluding them from the asset group or allocating them to a separate campaign with a smaller budget. Regularly review your feeds to ensure they're approved and up-to-date.