Google recently introduced innovative new features for Performance Max, some of which are already available and others that are coming soon. I joined a Google Partner event introducing these new features and will detail how you can use them to reach your digital advertising goals.
If you’re unfamiliar, Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that uses machine learning to optimize ad delivery and bidding in real-time across multiple placements to maximize performance against your indicated goal, such as clicks or conversions. Performance Max allows for a variety of ad formats – text, image, and video – across placements – Google Search, Google Display Network, YouTube, and Google Maps. The effectiveness of this campaign format is evident in its ability to attract both new customers and encourage repeat purchases.
Cro Metrics successfully used Performance Max to efficiently expand reach and boost sales for a direct-to-consumer e-commerce skincare brand. By providing Google with relevant audience signals and developing creative lifestyle-centric content, we decreased customer acquisition costs, scaled up purchase volume, and achieved a 4X return on ad spend.
Let’s dive into how you can make use of Google’s newest Performance Max features to drive impact for your brand.
New Features
Account level negative keywords
You can now add negative keywords at the account level to prevent your ads from reaching irrelevant traffic and reduce wasted spend. Audience targeting on Performance Max has been a black box with brands lacking insight into what audience parameters Google’s AI determines it should optimize to. With this new feature, we now have the ability to better influence who we deliver ads to, which in turn improves spend efficiency, performance, and brand control.
Bear in mind that once these are added they’ll apply to all of your campaigns. Instead you can:
- Create a negative keyword list specifically for Performance Max campaigns
- Ask Google Support to apply it to your Performance Max campaigns
Video creation tool
If, like many companies, you lack the expertise or team capacity to regularly create and edit video content, then you’re going to love Google Performance Max’s new video creation tool. The significance of video continues to grow as it becomes increasingly essential for captivating users and effectively conveying messages.
This tool allows brands and advertisers to easily build high quality assets in platform from premade templates, increasing the likelihood your campaign will drive impact. The video creation tool is a relatively low lift, highly superior option compared to Google’s legacy solution of automatically creating a slideshow from your provided static assets. It’s available directly in the Assets section of the Performance Max campaign workflow.
Experiments
Experimentation is key to unlocking growth and core to how we work here at Cro Metrics. Needless to say, I love Google Performance Max’s Experiments feature! Experiments enables you to determine the incremental value of adding a new Performance Max campaign to your existing campaign mix by conversion volume and value.
Compare the performance of a Standard Shopping campaign directly with a Performance Max campaign to determine how to best allocate your budget to scale sales. Don’t stop there: Perform comparative tests across other performance campaigns, such as Display, Video, or Discovery, that have comparable settings and optimize for the same conversions. And campaign types are just the beginning. With Experiments, you can uncover insights about audience signals and ad creative to inform ongoing optimizations and additional testing. The more data the better.
Upcoming Features
Page feeds
In the coming months, you will have the ability to upload a page URL feed to your Performance Max campaigns, enabling you to enhance Search inventory results even further. By using page feeds, you will have the ability to direct traffic to specific landing page URLs on your website. Additionally, you can conveniently organize these URLs based on themes using labels, making them more accessible for targeted campaigns or asset groups.
Asset group reporting
Google will soon roll out comprehensive reporting at the Performance Max asset group level, including conversions, conversion value, cost, and various other metrics. Today, you can only see these metrics at the campaign level. This valuable data will allow you to glean more specific insights, understand how each asset group contributes to your overall campaign performance, and optimize accordingly.
Google’s new Performance Max features offer a range of benefits to brands and advertisers looking to stay ahead in digital advertising. As the digital advertising landscape continues to become more competitive, brands quick to strategically test into new tools and capabilities will remain a step ahead of the competition.
Learn more about how Cro Metrics experimentation-led Paid Media can grow your revenue, and please send me a message if you have any questions about this post.