Set up Performance Max experiments in the Experiments page

Performance Max experiments let you test changes to your existing Google Ads campaigns, and measure the results to understand the impact of Performance Max campaigns towards your business goals.

Performance Max Uplift experiments help you measure the uplift or incremental benefit of using Performance Max alongside your existing Search, Video, Discovery, and Display campaigns.

How it works

A control and trial group is created for each experiment such that Performance Max displays ads only to viewers in the trial group alongside your other campaigns, and not to viewers on the control group. This means that the Performance Max campaign will only run on 50% of eligible traffic during the experiment.

Take a look at the below terminologies:

• User selects: This is the Performance Max campaign that you want to measure uplift for.
• Automatically selected: This is a group of comparable campaigns from the same account (the list of campaigns can be edited post experiment set up).
• Traffic split: It’s 50% by default for all campaigns included in the experiment.
• Control group: It’s a group of existing comparable campaigns in the account at 50% traffic (Performance Max traffic is suppressed or zero for advertisers in this group).
• Trial group: It’s a group of existing comparable campaigns in the account at 50% traffic, and the selected Performance Max campaign at 50% traffic.

Setup Uplift experiments for Performance Max

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click Experiments drop down menu from the page menu on the left.
   • Note: If you don't see the “Experiments” drop-down in the left page menu, click + Show more at the bottom of the page menu to expand the available options.
3. Click Performance Max campaign experiments.
4. To create a new experiment, click the plus button , and then click + Test uplift from Performance Max.
5. Click Select campaign to select an existing Performance Max campaign for the experiment. If you want to create a new campaign for your experiment, click Create new.
6. Click Confirm.
   • In the “Performance Max (treatment)” section, your selected campaign will be tested against an automatically selected list of comparable campaigns. You can update this list in the future.
7. From the “Traffic split” section, select the traffic split percentage as “Treatment group” and “Control group”.
8. Click Next.
9. View which campaigns are in each experiment arm in the “Test groups” section.
10. To rename your campaign, click on the “Experiment name” field.
11. Click the “Start date” drop-down to select the start date.
12. Click Schedule.

Important: It’ll take one day after the experiment starts to populate the list of comparable campaigns that were automatically chosen for the experiment. After the list is populated, you’ll get an option to edit the comparable campaign list, and add or remove any campaigns from your experiment. You can make these changes for up to 7 days from your experiment’s start date.

Setup regular shopping campaign vs. Performance Max experiments

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click Experiments drop down menu from the page menu on the left.
   • Note: If you don't see the “Experiments” drop-down in the left page menu, click + Show more at the bottom of the page menu to expand the available options.
3. Click Performance Max campaign experiments.
4. To create a new experiment, click the plus button , and then click +Test vs. Shopping campaign.
5. Click Select campaign to add an existing Performance Max campaign for the experiment. Note that you can test only one Shopping campaign against Performance Max. Click the pencil icon to reselect your campaign.
6. From the “Traffic split” section, select the traffic split percentage as “Treatment group” and “Control group”.
7. Click Next.
8. View which campaigns are in each experiment arm in the “Test groups” section.
9. To rename your campaign, click on the “Experiment name” field.
10. Click the “Start date” drop-down to select the start date.
11. Click Schedule.
12. Click Create new if you would like Google to automatically create a Performance Max campaign to test against with the same exact settings or targeting.

Create a new Performance Max campaign

1. Select your campaign objective.
2. Next, review your conversion goals and if required, remove goals by clicking on the 3-dot icon. If you want to add more goals, click Add goal.
3. In the “What are you advertising?” section, make one of the following choices:
   • Hotels: Select the hotel you want to advertise.
   • Something else: Add feed label and country of sale by clicking the respective fields. Note that the feed label will replace the selected country of sale. Alternatively, if you don’t want to use a feed label, select a country of sale.
4. Add your campaign name and click Continue.
5. A recommended budget populates in the “Bidding” section based on the standard Shopping campaign's budget and the traffic split percentage chosen.
6. Select whether you want to optimize “Performance Max towards Conversion value or Conversions.
7. Set an optional target return on ad spend (uncheck the box above if you don’t want to set a target return on ad spend).
8. In “Locations”, select a target location.
9. In “Languages”, you can select specific languages or simply click All languages.
10. Set “Final URL expansion”. It’s recommended to keep “Final URL expansion” on to view maximum performance benefits from your Performance Max campaign.
11. Now, select a start date and the end date is automatically set to 3 months from the selected start date.
12. Click More settings to adjust “Ad schedule” and “Campaign URL options”.
13. Click Next to set up your asset group.
14. Add asset group name, assets, and audience signal.
15. Click Next.
16. Set any required extensions by setting up “Call extensions”, “Load form extension”, and “Sitelink extensions”.
17. Click Next.
18. Now review the summary of your experiment and click Publish campaign when ready.
19. After publishing your campaign, you’ll be taken back to the page where you set up the experiment.
20. Now, scroll down and click Next.
21. Review your experiment settings again then click Schedule.

13. If you already have a Performance Max campaign that you wanted to test with, click Select campaign.
    1. Select a required campaign and click Next.
    2. A default name will appear in “Experiment name”.
    3. Select a start date and click Schedule.

Related links

• About Performance Max campaigns
• About the Experiments page (formerly drafts and experiments)
• Build an asset group
• Create a Performance Max campaign