What is a Performance Max campaign?
A Performance Max campaign is a goal-based campaign type, which allows advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. This type of campaign uses automation and machine learning to reach potential customers. When used correctly, they are great at helping businesses find more converting customers, which leads to an increase in performance.
When should you use it?
Performance Max is the best option if your business has specific advertising and conversion goals.
If an advertiser wants to maximise the performance of their campaign, they aren’t limited by which channels the ads can appear on.
Finally, you should use a Performance Max campaign if you want to get additional reach and conversion value that is beyond keyword-based search campaigns.
Benefits of a Performance Max campaign
It’s no secret that there are a lot of positives when it comes to Performance Max campaigns. Here are just some of the benefits:
The main positive for a campaign like this is that they are able to find more converting customers and businesses are able to customise the goals that matters to them. Performance Max campaigns can unlock different customer segments that you may not have expected!
One of the best things about the Performance Max campaigns is how easy they are to set up. After the advertiser sets up their standard budget, location targets and preferred campaign settings, the different assets are uploaded into one singular area. The only thing you need to add after this are extensions, which are not essential to get the campaign activated.
A great thing about Performance Max campaigns is that they can provided rich insights. The Performance Max asset reporting can help an advertiser to understand which creatives are impacting performance and help to optimise creatives, to drive the ROI.
Here are a list of some other positives:
- Unlock new audiences across Google’s channels and networks
- Drive better performance against your goals
- Get more transparent insights
- Steer automation with your campaign inputs
- Simplify campaign management and easily optimise your ads
Negatives of a Performance Max campaign
Despite the fact that they can offer a variety of benefits for advertisers, it’s important to note that Performance Max campaigns lack success in a few areas. Here are just a couple of the negatives:
Even though Google tries to provide insight on the top-performing audiences, there isn’t enough data to highlight conclusive results about what is and what isn’t working. Perhaps rating them on a ‘Great, Good and Low’ basis isn’t the way forward! In result, advertisers are limited to the data Google chooses to provide. There is little visibility on channel-specific performance and how exactly the provided assets are being utilised.
Finally, Performance Max campaigns are limited to a one bid strategy, which is ‘maximize conversions’. If an advertiser wanted more control over their budget, how it’s spent and CPC’s, it would be wise for them to look elsewhere and toward more channel-specific campaigns.