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With Google’s Performance Max slated to replace Smart Shopping entirely for businesses, there are many questions surrounding what it is and how it works. What exactly are the benefits of Performance Max, and what kind of advertisers should be using it?
In this video, we'll delve into the details of Performance Max and shed some light on this offering from Google.
Transcript
Google's Performance Max is set to replace Smart Shopping entirely for businesses this year. What exactly are the benefits of Performance Max and what sort of advertisers should be using it? Performance Max is a goal-based campaign type with the aim of letting advertisers increase conversions over Google's range of advertising channels. This includes Search, Display, Discover, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube. This campaign type promises more conversions by optimizing ad performance in real-time across all of Google's advertising channels using Smart Bidding. Advertisers upload various assets appropriate to each channel like images and video, and then Google's machine learning then tests which combinations work best for your campaigns.
The intention is to have a single campaign optimization across all platforms. Performance Max hopes to increase online leads and conversions through the automated optimization of the budget across all Google platforms. Performance Max can help you discover new audience segments that you might not have been aware of. This can help you get your ads in front of more interested shoppers. Much like Smart Shopping campaigns Performance, Max operates as a "data black box". Whilst you get results on top-performing audiences, you don't receive all of the data that can be used to optimize other campaigns. Data transparency is a crucial component of campaign optimization.
The ability to have single campaign optimization across all Google advertising platforms is definitely a plus, but you gain almost no visibility on channel-specific performance and how the assets you provide are utilized. Since there's no channel-specific performance for advertisers, you can't be sure that your campaigns aren't sabotaging some of your other campaigns. Google hasn't implemented any device modifiers, and there aren't any device-specific data on the performance given to advertisers. This makes it hard to test campaigns to their fullest, and you have no way of comparing desktop and mobile.
Performance Max would work well for advertisers looking to appear on all of Google's advertising platforms with the ability to access this all from a single campaign. It's also a good option for in-house advertisers, possibly for smaller businesses that are looking to set up a simple Google campaign. However, Performance Max doesn't offer established retailers the same amount of growth opportunities as other campaign management options.
Advertisers using Google's automated bidding may find that they're missing out on valuable bits of data and may find it harder to compete within their market. If you'd like to learn a bit more about Google Shopping and about Bidnamic, you can book a demo online, or you can reach out to one of our Google Shopping Specialists.
