Performance Max is a versatile campaign, but understanding the nuances and adapting it to the account you’re working on can be the difference between investing budget and burning it.
One significant reason is that the quality and intent of traffic from Performance Max can vary considerably based on how you configure it. This will depend on your choices around retargeting, new customer bidding and segmentation with other campaigns like Search or Shopping.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the different approaches to Performance Max:
Performance Max can be a different beast depending on how you set it up and how much data you feed it, but there are three general approaches:
Now let’s look at the nuances of the different types of ad accounts that might use one or more of these Performance Max setups.
Performance Max for ecommercePerformance Max and ecommerce seem to be made for each other; it’s certainly the best use case we have today for Google’s machine-driven campaign.
However, many ecommerce advertisers continue to make fundamental errors that impede success such as:
Fortunately, these are all fixable. If you struggle with any of these, learn how to solve seven mistakes that tank retail Performance Max campaigns.
DTC ecommerceFor direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands, Meta is still the holy grail of advertising channels. It’s tough to argue with that position, given how many brands have scaled on the back of growth programs centered around Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns.
But no channel is immune to challenges like volatility, saturation and reliability. This is why I recommend that ecommerce advertisers test out Google Ads, even if they want to remain Meta-first.
When it comes to Performance Max, these brands have a couple of traits that are relevant:
These all impact decisions around how many campaigns you need, how to structure each one and what work you need to do on your feed, creatives and landing pages.
With all of those in place, you’ll want to make sure your product feed is in order, that you use captivating product imagery and that you build a post-click experience that excites people enough to convert.
Retail ecommerceOne key distinction between DTC and retail ecommerce is that the latter generally advertise a larger number of SKUs across multiple brands. Within this segment, I see two clear distinctions:
For both, Performance Max can send very different types of traffic to their website or landing page. Much of the quality will be determined by how the campaign is structured, including bid strategies and whether the account uses brand exclusions to ensure incrementality.
Teaser of an analysis for bid strategies in Performance Max ecommerce campaigns. Click like and I'll either tag you or DM you when the research drops next week.
95% of PMax advertisers are using max conv. val
Any guesses how many are setting an efficiency target?#ppcchat pic.twitter.com/sH6vI4HpKc
I spoke to one advertiser who shared an audit of his Google Ads account, saying that he paused Google Ads and overall revenue was not impacted at all.
I can see why in that audit.
The campaign simply brought back people who were already going to purchase from him (i.e., a lot of branded and retargeting traffic). But you can set up Performance Max to focus on net new customers and new business.
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Business email address Subscribe Processing... Performance Max for lead generationWhat exactly makes Performance Max such a hassle for lead-generation accounts? Aside from the variety of inventory these campaigns can serve, the biggest challenge is the actual nature of lead generation.
In ecommerce, a purchase actually is the conversion.
The creation of a lead, however, is just the start. Just because you get a conversion from a form doesn’t mean you’ve made the sale or that they’re even qualified to sell to.
This is why offline conversions are critical: You can train Performance Max on which “conversions” became sales or at least got close to contributing revenue. Without that, you’re letting Google optimize future leads based on that limited window of data.
Low-budget lead generationRunning ads for a service or lead-based business is difficult enough. When that account is new or limited by budget, competing against high-spending accounts with plenty of historical data makes it even tougher to crack the code.
If your business or client is new to Google Ads or has a modest budget, that’s when they need more support and calculated decision-making.
With just a few hundred or thousand dollars in budget, the pressure is on for everything to be dialed in and working well. The truth is that in this scenario, Performance Max is probably not your best friend.
We've had some success on lead gen with PMax, and verified the quality with lead tracking. Many times the traffic is garbage, but we've had a few clients that get a good number of leads from PMax that are quality.
— Mark Subel (@marksubel) May 30, 2024Because Performance Max is driven by machine learning, a new account with no historical data – or one that doesn’t spend enough to gather enough of it – is better off running a traditional Search campaign.
Additional reading:
If you’ve got the budget to tolerate some of Performance Max’s issues and lower-quality placements, there are also ways of making it work for lead generation.
The most important prerequisites for this are:
Check out this detailed guide on how to set up these protective measures for lead-generation Performance Max.
You might also want to consider implementing a value-based bidding strategy, where you assign pipeline stages different values based on what each CRM deal stage is worth to your business.
Google is then able to find more leads in the future who share the data points that it determines your revenue-generating conversions have in common (this is also done using the GCLID as an identifier).
Here’s an example of how that looks for a Salesforce-connected account progressing from prospect to closed-won. You can see that an appointment being scheduled makes a lead five times more valuable than the previous stage, while a closed-won deal is 15 times more valuable.
This approach to lead valuation tells Google to find more people who are likely to progress further down this path, improving your overall conversion rate and limiting how many low-quality leads clog the pipeline.
In 2022, Performance Max absorbed local campaigns.
For businesses that make sales from physical locations but advertise on Google, Performance Max is the primary way to access these features that include paid placements on Google Maps, Display, Search, YouTube and other inventory.
5⃣ Can I run Performance Max for a local business?
Yes. Local campaigns were rolled into PMax, so if you want to advertise on Maps, you’ll have to use it.
Turn off Location Expansion in campaign settings. I recommend setting target areas to within a 30- or 45-minute drive.