Video: How to optimize Performance Max campaigns

About 

In this video, Julio, our US Client Success Manager talks about how you can optimize your Performance Max campaigns. 

Transcript

"Hi, I'm Julio Garza and I'm the US Client Success Manager. In this video, I'm going to tell you how you can get the most out of Google Performance Max campaigns.

Google recommends running Performance Max campaigns for a minimum of six weeks. This allows Google's machine learning algorithm enough time to collect data and optimize delivery. Performance Max campaigns use asset groups. Asset groups are similar to the traditional ‘ad groups’ in Google Ad campaigns.

Asset groups are made up of a collection of ‘creatives’: this can be images, videos, headlines and descriptions. These asset groups better represent your inventory. Once your campaign is up and enough data has been collected, it's a good idea to split your asset groups into multiple groups.

The groups should have different assets so that each group represents of your product inventory. For example, you could have an asset group with a theme ‘hats’ and a separate one for 'shoes'. Simply put, audience signals are audience suggestions. This feature helps to inform Google who it thinks the ads would be best suited for.

Audience signals are tied to an asset group, so you need to build audience signals every time you build an asset group.

You can look at your calendar view to see if there are specific times or days when your Performance Max campaign is getting a low return on ad spend. Once you've highlighted a pattern, you can edit the ad schedule to only serve ads at profitable times, helping you to manage your ad budget.

Performance Max can use ad extensions to add additional information and call to actions like call us now, book an appointment or showing ‘shop near you’. This expands the size of your ad and improves the overall user experience by creating useful shortcuts in the navigation. When using ad extensions, you should address common queries that users might be looking for.

Finally, let's quickly talk about what to do if you're still running Smart Shopping campaigns alongside Performance Max.

To avoid any potential drops in performance, Google recommends setting a similar budget for your Performance Max campaign as any existing Smart Shopping campaigns. This is to ensure that your Performance Max campaigns can capture previous Shopping inventory.

Performance Max will be prioritized by Google over Smart Shopping campaigns that run the same products in the same account. This will cause spending in your Smart Shopping campaigns to significantly decrease and Performance Max will increase in its place. Google is constantly testing different combinations of text and display ads to maximize results. 

It's important to provide at least five variations of both text and images to allow the machine to run several tests and improve efficiency across different ad placements. Try developing content around macro topics to test which resonates better with your target audience. I hope you found this video useful, and if you want to talk more about Google Shopping and how Bidnamic's technology is working alongside Performance Max, you can book a demo with us."