Upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max with a one-click tool in 2022. Learn more.
As the next generation of Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max is the newest way to achieve your online sales and/or store goals across YouTube, Display, Search, Discovery and more. For omnichannel advertisers with a website and physical locations, Performance Max simplifies managing your online and store presence from a single campaign to capture cross-channel opportunities.
1. Create new campaigns with Performance Max
Reminder
If you have existing Smart Shopping or Local campaigns, upgrade to Performance Max using the one-click tool in Google Ads once it becomes available in your account.
- Set up your campaign
Like Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max campaigns are goal-based and can be configured towards online sales, store or omnichannel goals. You can also connect a feed, like your Google Merchant Center product feed or business data feed, to Performance Max campaigns.
- Add a wider range of creative assets
If you have online sales goals, connecting your product feed to Performance Max campaigns will automatically make it eligible to run. Still, we strongly recommend that you also add a variety of text, image and video assets, which will allow your Performance Max campaign to serve across more eligible surfaces and inventory to achieve optimal performance. Creative assets are required in order to serve ads on store goals formats.- Ensure that any newly created Performance Max campaign with online sales goals does not contain overlapping products with your existing Smart Shopping campaigns.
- Ensure that any newly created Performance Max campaigns with exclusively store goals do not contain overlapping products or creative assets if existing Local campaigns are targeting the same business locations as the newly created Performance Max campaigns.
- If you create a Performance Max campaign for online sales goals with a Google Merchant Center product feed, we strongly recommend that you include additional creative assets in order to help drive the best performance. If creative assets are not provided, in some cases, we may help auto-generate the following assets on your behalf:
- Videos are auto-generated based on the provided text and image assets.
- If you turn on the final URL expansion feature, headlines and descriptions may be auto-generated for Search text ads based on the provided final URL. This is not available to campaigns with exclusively store goals.
- Headlines and descriptions are auto-generated based on the provided final URL. This is not available to campaigns with exclusively store goals.
- If you create a Performance Max campaign for store goals, you must include creative assets, such as headlines, descriptions, calls-to-action, and a final URL. You may also associate a business data feed to your campaigns to promote products and promotions available in stores.
Note
For advertisers with a Google Merchant Center product feed, Performance Max campaigns serve on the best inventory across Google channels, and will be prioritized over existing Smart Shopping campaigns, standard Shopping campaigns, and Display Dynamic Remarketing campaigns that cover the same products. As a result, we do not recommend running these in parallel with overlapping targeting (e.g., with overlapping products in the same geographic region, etc).
- View reporting and insights
Dig into how automation is working to help you achieve your online sales and store goals. These actionable insights will help you optimize your creatives and overall campaign performance.- From the new Insights page, you can view:
- Consumer interest insights group search terms into themes to help you understand what consumers are looking for when your ads appear.
- Audience insights show you the audiences that are most performant for your ads.
- Search trends help you understand search interest related to the products and services you show ads for.
- From the Asset groups page at the Campaign level, you’ll also get asset reporting, which shows you how different assets are performing in your campaign and the top-performing combinations of asset types (ex. text, images and videos). This will allow you to make strategic decisions on which assets to keep, remove or improve.
- From the new Insights page, you can view:
Note
Insights won’t always be generated for every account and campaign at all times. Learn more about why you might not see Insights.
- To account for ramp up time and conversion delays, wait 1-2 weeks before evaluating the performance of campaigns with online sales. For campaigns with in-store-only or omnichannel goals, allow for up to 3-4 weeks.
2. Start upgrading your existing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max
- When the upgrade tool is ready for you to use, you will be notified in your Google Ads account, where you can initiate the upgrade from the “Campaigns” page, “Recommendations” page or “Notifications” panel. You can either bulk upgrade all your campaigns at once, or select specific campaigns to upgrade individually.
- Your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will continue to run until the upgrade process is complete, which should take a day or less. You will be able to keep track of upgrade statuses on your “Campaigns” page.
- Once your campaigns are upgraded using the “one-click” upgrade tool, your new campaigns will be able to run immediately with no ramp-up time.
- Even though your previous campaigns will no longer be editable, their performance learnings, budget, settings and assets will be carried over to Performance Max to ensure performance continuity. You will still be able to view historical data for these campaigns, which will now have a "Removed" status in Google Ads.
- Refer to the following milestones around the upgrade experience:
- Upgrade with one-click tool: Over the coming weeks, a “one-click” upgrade tool will begin rolling out in Google Ads to upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns. You’ll be able to upgrade your Local campaigns with the tool starting in June.
- Upgrade automatically: From July through September, your Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically upgraded for you. Your Local campaigns will be automatically upgraded from August through September. You will no longer be able to create new Smart Shopping and Local campaigns once your existing campaigns are automatically upgraded.
- Conclude upgrades: The upgrade process will conclude by the end of September to give you time to use your Performance Max campaigns for the holiday season.
Note
If you are upgrading both Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, each campaign will be upgraded to a new, separate Performance Max campaign that optimizes to your pre-existing online and/or offline goals.
Learn more about the upgrade process and FAQs here.
For more information about Performance Max, check out the following articles:
- Achieve your goals across Google’s ad channels with Performance Max
- Create a Performance Max campaign
- Optimization tips for Performance Max
- Fix issues with Performance Max campaigns
