To a business owner, the local footprint is crucial when gathering sales. Keeping their proverbial “backyard” can’t be understated, with so much competition not only trying to secure their own territory, but grab new market share as well.
Google has a solution. What if a business was not only able to cover their own area through local searches, but also advertise on a handful of other popular products all within the same campaign? With more products being developed, and with customers clamoring for a “one-stop-shop” model, Performance Max was born.
What Is Performance Max?
Performance Max essentially allows you to purchase ads across most of the Google product line, including:
- Search Network
- Display Network
- YouTube
- Maps
- Gmail
- Discover
What sets it apart from traditional campaigns is that with Performance Max ads would then serve from a single campaign, rather than breaking them out individually. This allows you to show to more customers and, depending on your set goals, obtain more conversions.
How Does Performance Max Work?
With a Performance Max campaign, Google uses both advertiser input and machine learning in order to serve ads.
Machine Learning
- Using campaign-specific signals, Google optimizes its resources to find new and returning customers
- With smart bidding, auction-time bids will automatically adjust based on the campaign goals and whether or not the system interprets the customer as a probable conversion
Audience Signals
- Inputs which tell Google what type of customer you’re looking to attract
- Such signals may include in-market and custom audiences, as well as remarketing to target returning visitors
With the audience signals and campaign goals in place, the system uses those factors to find what they determine to be a likely customer.
Why Choose a Performance Max Campaign?
Greater Conversions
Combining Google automation with campaign-specific audience targeting and goals is a recipe for success. Add onto that the ability to showcase the ad across most of the Google product lineup, it allows for a higher chance for quality leads.
Adaptability
With individual campaign types, optimizing them to reach their full potential and hit the right people is a daunting task. With Performance Max, however, the system essentially does everything for you. If Google feels a user has a good chance to convert, they will serve ads to them based on where they are. This flexibility is key, no matter where in the buying process the customer is at.
When Should You Use a Performance Max Campaign?
While this campaign type is crucial for any business wanting to attract more customers, it doesn’t take the place of your other campaigns. Performance Max campaigns will still be key in driving store visits, however with both audience signals and Google machine learning, it takes away some control as one would have with a keyword-based campaign, for example.
Among the many incentives for using Performance Max are:
- Reach more people via the Google product suite
- Get more foot traffic with local listings
- Use campaign-specific goals
- Achieve increased conversion rate with higher visibility to potential customers
While the positives are immense, we’d be remiss if some potential negatives weren’t mentioned:
- Limited data currently available, making it more difficult to perform certain optimization tasks
- Fully automated, so there’s some lack of control in relation to bid adjustments
- Machine learning takes some time to process input, causing a delay in the posting of ads, in turn limiting their full potential in the short term
Running Performance Max Along With Other Campaigns
It’s a best practice to run Performance Max along with other campaigns concurrently — such as Search, Display, Video – as they do complement each other. There is rarely any overlap or issue, and since Performance Max campaigns use more signals than only keywords, Search campaigns will likely take priority at auction. Some situational examples include:
- Exact search matches will be heavily favored towards the Search Campaign
- Non-exact searches will be served by whichever campaign has the higher ad rank
What’s Needed To Run a Performance Max Campaign?
The assets needed in order to access all of the Google inventory are:
- Headline, Long Headline, and Description
- Three individually-sized images
- Business logo
- Video (greater than ten seconds)
While its inception is still local-focused, the ability to set locations now allows this new campaign type to broaden the scope of any business’ marketing objective. And with the inclusion of the immense Google product library, Performance Max truly is a one-stop-shop.To get your company set up with Performance Max, or any SEM campaign, contact our highly-experienced team at Aronson Advertising today.
