July 27, 2022
It’s all about Google’s Performance Max campaigns this month! In this blog, we are going through all the new features Google has rolled out this month to help you customise and improve your Performance Max campaigns.
[lwptoc skipHeadingLevel=”h1,h4,h5,h6″]
Performance Max is Google’s latest goal-based campaign type that allows advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. It’s designed to complement keyword-based Search campaigns to help advertisers find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Since April, you can upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max to access additional inventory and formats using a “one-click” tool in Google Ads. The tool gives you the flexibility to upgrade specific campaigns or all of your campaigns at once.
Last week, Google began to roll out automatic updates converting Smart Shopping campaigns into Performance Max. Google will send a notification about 2-3 weeks before the updates take effect and provide a specific date when your campaigns will be converted. Once your campaigns are automatically upgraded, you’ll no longer be able to create new Smart Shopping or Local campaigns.
To help advertisers ensure their Performance Max campaigns are set up correctly, Google has launched diagnostic insights on the Insights and Overview page. The insights are aimed to help ensure that your ads don’t violate ad policies and that no issues are making it hard to measure conversions, causing low engagement or disapproved ads.
When a new Performance Max campaign is launched, the diagnostic insights view can automatically identify issues related to:
You’ll also be able to view recommendations via the progress bar. Currently, the insights are only available for Performance Max campaigns, but Google says they plan on rolling out the insights for other campaign types in the next few months.
Diagnostic insights are only one of several new features for Performance Max campaigns Google has rolled out this month:
The optimisation score estimates how well your Google Ads account is set to perform and ranges from 0-100%. If your Performance Max campaign is graded at less than 100%, you’ll get a list of recommendations that can help you optimise your campaign and increase your score.
Seasonality adjustments are now available for Performance Max campaigns. You can tailor your bid strategy to events where conversion rates are expected to be higher or lower than usual. Smart Bidding already accounts for predicted seasonal events. However, you could still use seasonality adjustments if you foresee significant changes to conversion rates that are sudden or atypical, like promotions and sales.
Smart Bidding uses conversions and conversion value data in Google Ads to help you meet your advertising goals. Anything that causes reported conversions or conversion value in Google Ads to be incorrect, like tagging issues or website outages, may affect Smart Bidding. Data exclusions is a tool that tells Smart Bidding to ignore all data from dates when
there were issues with your conversion tracking to prevent unintended issues with conversion tracking from affecting your Performance Max bid strategy.
In your Performance Max campaign settings under “Location options,” you can find the new advanced location targeting options. These will help you be more precise with your location targeting by letting you include or exclude people based on where they’re likely to be located or regularly located or the places they’ve shown interest in.
Last but not least, explanations give you insights into large changes in your Performance Max campaign performance. When you discover a significant fluctuation in performance for a certain campaign or ad group, explanations help you quickly find out why it happened. Additionally, Google Ads sometimes provides recommendations that appear alongside explanations to help you improve your performance going forward. Moreover, in Performance Max campaigns for online sales with a product feed, you’ll see explanations that offer analysis of your products that saw the most significant changes in performance.