Upgrade Timeline
You’ll be able to upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns using our self-upgrade tool in Google Ads starting in April. You’ll be able to upgrade your Local campaigns starting in June. The tool gives you options to upgrade specific campaigns or all of your campaigns at once. You’ll be notified in Google Ads once the upgrade tool becomes available to you.
If you choose not to upgrade early, your Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically upgraded between July and September, and your Local campaigns will be automatically upgraded between August and September. Once your campaigns are automatically upgraded, you’ll no longer be able to create new Smart Shopping or Local campaigns.
Your campaign settings, such as goals, budget, bid strategy, creative assets, and product targeting, will automatically transfer to Performance Max. You’ll also be able to add audience signals to speed up the machine learning optimization process. Learn more about the settings and features of Performance Max
After the upgrade, we recommend adding additional creative assets, such as text, images, and videos, to your Performance Max campaign to enable serving on additional inventory. Learn more about how Performance Max will interact with other campaign types in your account
Benefits of Performance Max campaigns
- Goals-based campaign type maximizes your marketing objectives across all Google Ads inventory: Include your business goals as the primary target for Performance Max, and let Google Ads automation find your customers wherever they are across Google properties.
- Serve on additional Google Ads inventory: Performance Max ads are eligible to serve on YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.
- Optimal machine learning for stronger performance: Performance Max uses the best of Google Ads machine learning and attribution technology to help deliver better performance.
- Unlock time to focus on strategic performance drivers: Simplified campaign management and automation save you time, so you can focus on more strategic and impactful optimizations.
- Increase conversions: Retail advertisers using Performance Max have an average 12% increase in conversion value at the same or better return on ad spend (ROAS) when upgrading from Smart Shopping campaigns. Advertisers with an offline-only conversion goal will have comparable performance with their Local campaigns.
- More robust reporting: The Insights report provides audience and other insights not currently available in Smart Shopping and Local campaigns reports.
- Equivalent features as Smart Shopping and Local campaigns: Performance Max has equivalent features as Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, plus additional functionality and inventory.
How to upgrade your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns to Performance Max
Google Ads Tutorials: How to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max
You can upgrade your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns to Performance Max directly from the “Campaigns” page, from the “Recommendations” page, or in one click from a notification in your account.
Upgrade from the “Campaigns” page
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- In the subpage menu on the left, select Campaigns.
- Click the filter icon
, then select Attributes.
- Select Campaign type, then select Local (or Shopping + Campaign subtype: Smart).
- Click Apply.
- Click the checkbox
next to each campaign you want to upgrade, or select the checkbox above the “Campaigns” table to select all campaigns.
- Click Edit in the dropdown above the “Campaigns” table.
- Select Upgrade to Performance Max.
- Click Apply.
To upgrade a single campaign, follow these steps.
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- In the subpage menu on the left, select Campaigns.
- Click the filter icon
, then select Attributes.
- Select Campaign type, then select Local (or Shopping + Campaign subtype: Smart).
- Click Apply.
- Under “Campaign type”, roll over “Upgrade available”.
- In the “Upgrade available” popup, click Apply.
- In the next “Upgrade available” popup, click Upgrade to Performance Max.
Upgrade from the “Recommendations” page
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- In the subpage menu on the left, select Recommendations.
- Click Apply all in the “Upgrade to Performance Max” recommendation to upgrade all campaigns in one click, or click “View Recommendations” and click the checkbox
next to each campaign you want to upgrade.
- In the confirmation modal, click Apply all to confirm.
Upgrade from a notification in Google Ads
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click on the notifications icon
in the top-right corner.
- Click on the “Upgrade campaigns” notification.
- In the notification, click Apply.
- In the confirmation modal, click Apply all to confirm.
What happens after the upgrade to Performance Max
After you upgrade to Performance Max, your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns will be automatically changed to “Removed” status. You won’t be able to edit or reactivate your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns, but you’ll still have access to the historical data for your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns in your Google Ads account.
FAQs
You’ll be able to upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max starting in April 2022. You’ll be able to upgrade your Local campaigns starting in June 2022. You’ll be notified in Google Ads once you’re eligible to upgrade your campaigns.
Between July and September, your Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically upgraded for you. Your Local campaigns will be automatically upgraded between August and September. You’ll no longer be able to create new Smart Shopping and Local campaigns once your existing campaigns are automatically upgraded. The features activated in your Smart Shopping or Local campaign will determine your eligibility to upgrade. If you’re unable to upgrade, no action is needed, and you’ll be notified when upgrade options are available.
Active and paused Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will be eligible for upgrade and eventually auto-upgraded. This also applies to active and paused campaigns with end dates in the past. We're including both paused and ended campaigns so you can easily restart your periodic and seasonal campaigns.
You can check the eligibility and progress of your upgrade from the “Campaign type” column on the “Campaigns” page. You’ll notice one of 4 different message types for each of your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns:
- Upgrade available: The upgrade to Performance Max hasn’t yet started. This is informing you of the option to upgrade.
- Upgrading to Performance Max: Your campaign is being upgraded to Performance Max and will continue running until the upgrade is complete. Edits to your original campaign won't be reflected in your newly created Performance Max campaign. You’ll be notified when the upgrade is complete.
- Upgraded to Performance Max: Your campaign was upgraded to Performance Max. To edit or manage it, go to the Performance Max campaign.
- Upgrade failed: If the upgrade to Performance Max is initially unsuccessful, you’ll be shown a failed message. No action is required on your part, and you’ll be notified once the upgrade is successful.
Once the upgrade is complete, you’ll notice a new Performance Max campaign in your account, which will have a status of “Upgraded”. If you hover over the status, you’ll have the option to be taken back to the original upgraded Smart Shopping or Local campaign.
Setting |
Smart Shopping campaigns | Performance Max |
Conversion goals | ||
Campaign type | Smart Shopping | Performance Max |
Google Merchant Center | ||
Google My Business | N/A | |
Locations | N/A | |
Feeds | N/A | |
Country of sale | ||
Campaign name |
|
|
Local products (on/off) |
|
|
Regional availability and pricing, Show products across multiple countries | ||
Budget | ||
Bid strategy |
|
|
Geo targeting | ||
Languages | N/A |
|
Ad schedule | ||
Start date, End date |
|
|
Ad destination (final URL) | ||
Final URL expansion | N/A |
|
Campaign URL options | N/A | |
Asset group name |
N/A | |
Product groups |
|
|
Ad group | Ad group:
|
Asset group:*
*In order for Performance Max to serve maximally across channels, it’s recommended that Smart Shopping and Local campaign advertisers add the assets listed above to their Smart Shopping or Local campaigns before initiating the upgrade to Performance Max. Assets can also be added after the upgrade. |
Audience signals | N/A |
|
Extensions | ||
Seasonality adjustments and Data Exclusions |
|
Performance Max campaigns should perform similarly or better than your Smart Shopping or Local campaigns. During Beta testing, retail advertisers noticed an average increase of 12% conversion value at the same or better ROAS by upgrading to Performance Max. Local advertisers should observe similar performance to their original Local campaign.
We recommend waiting 1-2 weeks to judge the performance of your new Performance Max campaign. Actual performance time will depend on many factors, such as whether you have other campaign history in your account, what your conversion goal action is, and how many conversions you can get with your daily budget.
- Asset groups
- Audience signals
- Expanded inventory for retail advertisers
- Expanded set of goals and new bidding features
- Final URL expansion
- Insights report
In the table below, you’ll find the additional reach and new features that Performance Max provides.
Campaign type being upgraded | Additional reach with Performance Max | New features with Performance Max |
Smart Shopping campaigns | YouTube In-Stream, Text (via DSA), Discover Feed |
Goals:
Bidding:
Reporting and insights:
|
Local campaigns | Local inventory ads on Search and Maps |
Goals:
Bidding:
Reporting and insights:
|
- On Search, for campaigns eligible for the same auctions, Performance Max will be selected based on ad rank.
- A Search campaign with a keyword that exactly matches or is spell-corrected to the user query will be preferred over Performance Max (for example, if the search term is "plumbrs", and your account includes the exact match keyword [plumbers] and the broad match keyword plumbrs, then the exact match keyword is preferred). If there are no keywords that exactly match the user query across keyword match types, the campaign with the higher ad rank will serve. Learn more About similar keywords in a Google Ads account
- Performance Max doesn’t cover Hotel campaign inventory (Hotel ads and property promotion ads).
- Performance Max doesn’t support App installs as a goal, so we recommend that you continue to run App campaigns for install.
- Performance Max will be prioritized over Smart Shopping campaigns, standard Shopping campaigns, and Display campaigns with a Merchant Center feed in your account if they’re targeting the same product inventory.
- App install goals
- Awareness and Consideration goals
- Hotel campaign inventory
- Keyword-targeted Search
No assets are required to launch a retail Performance Max campaign (as long as you add your Google Merchant Center account). However, additional creative assets will allow your campaign to serve on all available Performance Max inventory and improve your campaign’s performance. Therefore, we recommend adding creatives to your Performance Max asset groups once your Smart Shopping campaign upgrade is completed.
Some assets (such as video) may be generated automatically if you don’t provide them in your Performance Max campaign.