5 Benefits of Performance Max Campaigns

For over a year, our clients have been adopting Performance Max Campaigns, a new type of campaign available for Google Ads. Among clients who've adopted these campaigns (also called PMax campaigns), we've seen a positive increase in overall performance since adopting PMax into our strategy, including visibility, visits, and leads.

According to Google, advertisers who use Performance Max achieve on average over 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action. What's more, five of those percentage points were gained in roughly the last year, thanks to ongoing advancements in the underlying AI technology Google uses for bidding, creative and search query matching, and new formats such as YouTube Shorts.

These are incredible results that have been a boon to all of our clients who've implemented PMax campaigns. If you're considering whether Performance Max campaigns are a good investment for your business, contact us for a free demonstration of what a PMax campaign can do for your business.

We previously talked about what Performance Max campaigns are, and here we'll discuss five top reasons why your paid search marketing strategy should include a Performance Max campaign.

1. Increased Visibility

Performance Max campaigns leverage Google's machine learning technology to optimize your campaigns across all Google properties, saving you from having to implement a campaign in each platform. PMax enables marketers to reach potential customers across multiple touch points in a single campaign, increasing the chances of converting them into leads. This benefit is realized mostly in two main areas:

Ads Run On All of Google's Platforms

When you start a new Performance Max campaign, it will automatically run your ads across Google platforms, including:

YouTube
Display
Search
Discover
Gmail
Maps

This single campaign complements your existing, keyword-based Search campaigns to help your marketing performance across Google's full range of advertising channels. Your creative assets will be pooled together and automatically optimized for each platform by Google's advanced technology.

Machine Learning Optimizes Ads Per-Platform

In our increasingly-connected world, consumers move seamlessly between online experiences to find what they're looking for. In fact, 70% of U.S. shoppers say they buy from a brand after seeing it on YouTube, and over 90% began shopping immediately after discovering new products, brands, or services in their Google feed.

To optimize your ad spend across all of Google's properties, machine learning draws from all of your assets—both text and creative—and delivers the right ad, in the right format, at the right time to improve your conversion rates. In a lot of ways, PMax is the next iteration of Google Ads automation: it takes care of defining and managing your bid strategy so you can focus on providing a great service or product to your customers.

2. Advanced Audience Targeting

With a Performance Max campaign, you have a variety of targeting aspects at your fingertips to find your customers online. With Google's real-time understanding of consumer preferences and intent, PMax can unlock new customer segments you might've overlooked. When paired with your customer data and other audience signals, Performance Max can precisely target the consumers most likely to convert with you.

Audience Signals

Your Google PMax campaigns needs audience signals, provided by you, to begin targeting ads. Audience signals have the following types to help you design your campaigns:

Affinity signals segment your audience into groups based on a strong interest in a particular topic. For example, if you own a dog-grooming business, you'll want to choose a dog-loving affinity group as you create your campaign. Affinity signals help you create awareness of your business in your target market's community.
Life events allow you to target customers who are experiencing a big life event like getting married, buying a house, graduating, or another milestone.
In-Market targeting allows you to filter for users who've recently searched for products or services similar to your own.
Your current audience can target already-established clients or customers to keep them up-to-date about new offers. You can also remarket to visitors to your site who ultimately left without converting.
Similar audience: Google's machine learning AI can build audiences of people who have similar attributes, search behavior, and intent as your current audience, helping you reach customers you may not have considered.
Detailed demographics: You can target consumers based on demographic data such as their age, sex, financial situation, parental status, education status, industry, homeowner status, and a lot more.
Custom: You can also build your own signals with subsets from targeting consumers who've visited other sites, consumers who've searched for a specific keyword, and more.

As some other advanced targeting methods dwindle due to stricter privacy regulations, performance max is a useful tactic to help fill in those newfound marketing gaps without losing performance.

Contextual Targeting

In addition to Google's rich audience targeting tools, contextual targeting allows you to control the type of page on which your ads are placed. Contextual targeting is based on the content of the page or video where your ad is shown, which allows fine-grained control of the context your ad is placed in.

3. Improved Efficiency

One of the main value-adds of a Performance Max campaign is the efficiency it adds to your budget. Your advertising will go further thanks to Google's automated ad placement and bidding strategies.

Automated Ad Placement

Google's powerful AI tools are smart enough to figure out where your creative and written assets perform the best, and place them there automatically. It's able to deliver the right ad, in the right format, to the right place, at the right time to make the best impression on potential customers.

Automated Bidding

As a part of Google’s increasing ad automation, Performance max campaigns can also figure out where to spend money and when to make the biggest impact. In other words, you don't have to define a bid strategy: PMax takes care of it for you.

4. Creative Optimization

Google's Performance Max algorithm optimizes your creative assets, too, including headlines, descriptions, images, and videos, depending on what your audience responds to—all in real time. PMax campaigns use Google's machine learning technology to iterate combinations of the creative you supply, keeping the best-performing combinations across Google's properties to drive higher engagement and conversions.

This means you’re able to test all sorts of types of design and creative work to see what works best!

5. Enhanced Search Performance

Maybe the best part of Performance Max campaigns is that they easily coexist alongside your existing search campaigns, filling in opportunities for searches you could potentially be losing and helping you increase your conversion potential across your entire Ads account.

It also means that you can ease into PMax. Try starting one campaign, see how it does, and add in other Performance Max campaigns to fill in the gaps. Our clients really appreciate how it's not an all-or-nothing proposition from Google.

Should You Run a Performance Max Campaign?

Performance Max campaigns can give your business a real boost, but they work best if you have specific business goals for your ad spend, such as:

Specific conversion goals like increasing leads or sales
Maximizing campaign performance across channels and platforms
Using a single campaign for all of Google's properties
Reaching customers beyond Search

PMax also works best when it's fed your existing first-party data and pools your assets, so it can discover who your audience is and figure out the best combination of assets to reach them.

Performance Max campaigns are a powerful new tool in Google's toolbox, but they take knowledge and experience to generate the best returns. Click Here Digital has been working with PMax campaigns since they were launched, and we've built the experience to know how best to leverage them for your business. Let us take care of your online marketing so you can focus on your business.

Upgrade your Paid Ads with Performance Max Today!