Google Ads – Performance Max campaigns have replaced Smart Shopping for online businesses, and business owners have many questions about what it is and how it can help their eCommerce store. So what are the benefits of Performance Max, what kind of online advertiser should be using it, and can it help boost your online sales?
In this blog post we will go into the details of Performance Max.
What Is Performance Max?
Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type within Google Ads that has the aim of letting marketers increase conversions across Google’s advertising channels. This includes Search, Display, Discover, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube. This allows eCommerce store owners such as yourself to increase online presence across multiple different ad formats.
You can set your own conversion goals which will then be used by Google’s automated bidding technology.
This campaign type offers more conversions by optimising Google ad performance in real-time and across all your selected channels using Smart Bidding, Google’s AI-driven automated bidding, which is used in Smart Shopping campaigns.
As an advertiser, you will upload various assets appropriate to each channel, such as images and video, and Google’s machine learning approach then tests which combinations will work best for your campaigns. The goal is to have single-campaign optimisation across all advertising platforms. Targeting for these campaigns is based on audience signals, and is also dependent on your bid strategy.
What Are The Benefits Of Performance Max?
Google’s new campaign type promises advantages over other campaign types.
The goal of Google Ads Performance Max is to increase online leads and conversions through the automated optimisation of budgets and bids across all Google platforms. This can be more efficient than using a generic search campaign.
Using Google’s real-time data on shopper intent and preferences, Performance Max can help you discover new audience segments that you might not have been aware of. This can help you get your products in front of a larger demographic and even more interested shoppers.
This new campaign type relies on you supplying creative assets such as images and video. That means you can create assets that best suit your audience of shoppers, helping you take control of your Google ad campaigns.
What Are The Cons Of Performance Max?
Much like Smart Shopping campaigns, Performance Max operates as a ‘black box’. While you get results on your top-performing audiences, you don’t receive all the data that Google has available that could be used to reach conclusive results to accurately make campaign optimisations.
The ability to have single-campaign optimisation across all of Google’s advertising channels is definitely a plus, but you don’t have access to channel-specific performance and how the assets you provide are being used. This makes it difficult to optimise your campaign with regards to which channels and assets are working.
As you don’t receive channel-specific performance data, you can’t be sure that your campaigns are performing as well as they should be. As well as this, you can’t include negative keywords to prevent this from happening.
Unfortunately, Google also doesn’t all you to make any adjustments based on device and doesn’t provide any device-specific data on the performance of those campaigns. This makes it hard to test and optimise campaigns and you have no way of comparing desktop and mobile.
When Should You Choose Performance Max?
Performance Max will work well for you if you are looking to appear on all of Google’s advertising platforms, with the ability to access all of this from a single Google Ads campaign.
It’s also a great option for eCommerce businesses that want to run their Google Ads campaigns in-house. It’s perfect for your first campaign if you are looking to set up a simple Google campaign without much knowledge.
If however, you are a more established online retailer, given the drawbacks we have talked about above, Performance Max doesn’t really offer you the same opportunities for growth as other campaign types do. Using Google’s automated bidding could mean that you miss out on valuable campaign data and may find it harder to compete within your market.
If you had already setup Google Smart Shopping campaigns, your existing campaigns will have been automatically converted to Performance Max campaigns in September 2022.
If you need help with your Google Ads PPC campaigns why not sign up for our FREE PPC Audit or if you are looking to set up your first campaign contact one of our PPC marketing experts to discuss what we can do for your website.
