Display campaigns serve visually engaging ads that help you reach more potential customers across the Display Network. If your Display campaigns are eligible, you can simplify your advertising experience and upgrade those Display campaigns to Performance Max campaigns. This can help you find more converting customers in more places and drive performance based on your specific conversion goals.
With Performance Max, you can access all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign and use Google AI technologies for bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. Learn more About Performance Max campaigns.
This article will discuss
- Benefits of upgrading a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
- Eligibility factors
- Transitioning from your Display to a Performance Max campaign
- Creative ad assets: Performance Max campaign upgrade
- Bidding: Performance Max campaign upgrade
- Targeting settings: Performance Max campaign upgrade
- How to upgrade a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
- FAQs
Benefits of upgrading a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
- More conversions: Advertisers who use Performance Max campaigns may achieve more conversions at a similar cost.
- Additional coverage across various Google ads platforms: Performance Max ads also run on Search, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps to help you drive more conversions.
- AI (artificial intelligence) technology for stronger performance: Google AI technology can provide improved performance across bidding, targeting, creative optimization, and more.
- Robust insights: Performance Max provides rich insights that show where your campaign is helping you find the new and valuable categories and terms. Learn more about Understanding Performance Max results with the Insights page
Eligibility factors
You can choose to create a Performance Max campaign at any time. This section focuses on eligibility of an existing Display campaign to easily upgrade to a Performance Max campaign.
Your Display campaigns may be eligible to upgrade if they apply all of the following:
- Use Google Ads conversion tracking or Google Analytics 4 conversion tracking
- Leverage Google AI, such as Smart Bidding & optimized targeting
- Have responsive display ads (with a current limit of 100)
To gain access to the guided upgrade flow, consider adding Google AI to your existing Display campaigns.
Transitioning from your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
Note: When you upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign, the existing Display campaign is marked with the “Removed” status and your new Performance Max campaign is created. Learn more About campaign statuses.
If you think that you may want to run your Display campaign as it was before you upgraded it to a Performance Max campaign, simply copy the “Removed” Display campaign and create a new Display campaign. Should you wish to no longer use the new Performance Max campaign, you can pause or remove it. Learn how to Copy and paste campaigns, ad groups, ads, audiences and keywords.
When you upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign, your existing assets, budget, and applicable settings will move from your existing Display campaign to your newly created Performance Max campaign. Your Display campaign will be marked with the “Removed” status, and your upgraded Performance Max campaign can begin to serve ads within the first day. Learn more About campaign statuses.
You can view performance data of your previous Display campaign by filtering your campaigns by status and finding your “Removed” Display campaign.
Any activity that results from your new Performance Max campaign will be recorded in the new Performance Max campaign’s performance metrics.
Creative ad assets: Performance Max campaign upgrade
Display creatives that will transition to your Performance Max campaigns
Existing assets from your responsive display ads within your upgraded Display campaign will transition to asset groups in your new Performance Max campaign. An asset group will be created from each responsive display ad, with ad previews available in the upgrade tool for the new Performance Max campaign inventory.
Providing high quality text, images, and video can significantly improve performance of your new Performance Max campaign. The new campaign will also utilize advanced format features, including asset enhancement, auto-generated videos, and native formats based on the assets provided from your Display campaign.
- Supported (Learn about Display ad asset best practices)
- Images
- Videos
- Long headlines
- Short headlines
- Descriptions
- Logos (square and landscape)
- Business name
- Final URLs
- Ad extensions (visible only after you publish your new Performance Max campaign)
- Disclaimers (visible only after you publish your new Performance Max campaign)
- Calls to Action (Install, Visit Site, and See More calls to action are not supported in Performance Max campaigns. If you do have any of these selected in your previous Display campaign, the Google AI built into your new Performance Max campaign will replace those calls to action with the best fitting supported calls to action.)
- Not supported
- HTML and uploaded display ads
- GIFs
- Ad URL options
Bidding: Performance Max campaign upgrade
Your new Performance Max campaign will continue to use the eligible Smart Bidding strategy used in your previous Display campaign. It will also continue to combine that strategy with attribution technology that helps determine the best options for your campaign across all Google inventory, determining bids on auctions that have the highest probability of meeting your business goals in real-time.
If your previous Display campaign included a combination of different bidding targets at the campaign and ad-group levels, your new Performance Max campaign will use an average of those targets based on serving.
When you upgrade to your Performance Max campaign, your bid adjustments will be represented as a unified target for that campaign. You can change your bid adjustment from within your Performance Max campaign by adjusting your targeted bidding. Learn more about target CPA bidding and target ROAS bidding.
Targeting settings: Performance Max campaign upgrade
Once you update to Performance Max, your campaign will use Google AI to show ads to the most relevant audiences who are most likely to convert. Your campaign will continue to use Google AI to optimize performance across all Google channels. Learn more About optimized targeting.
While not required, campaign targeting and exclusions from your previous Display campaign can change in your new Performance Max campaign in the following ways.
Audience hints
Any existing audience segments (for example, your data segments and Customer Match segments) and demographic targeting within Display campaigns that you upgrade to Performance Max campaigns will become audience hints. This automated targeting helps you uncover new converting customers across all of Google’s channels and networks. Learn more about Performance Max audience signals.
User lists
User lists will not be automatically carried over from your Display campaign as it is upgraded to Performance Max, but if your goal is to optimize for new customers, you can move your Display campaign user lists to your new Performance Max campaign after your campaign has been upgraded. Performance Max offers new customer acquisition goals, so you can efficiently acquire new customers by bidding higher or bidding only to new customers. You can add lists of your existing customers to optimize for New Customer Acquisition goal (NCA) and set values for new customers to guide the AI. Choose between bidding higher (New Customer Value mode) or bidding only (New Customer Only mode) to acquire new customers based on your list. We recommend using New Customer Value mode when looking to acquire new customers.
Brand safety settings at the account level
In addition, brand safety settings from your previous Display campaign will be available at the account-level so that you can tell Google Ads which types of content you don’t want your ads to appear in. This will benefit your new Performance Max campaign and all other existing campaigns.
- Content exclusions (Digital content label, sensitive content, and content types exclusions) will move to the account level.
- Keyword and placement exclusions will have an option to include at the account level during the upgrade, but this will not be selected by default.
- We recommend only keeping those related to brand safety, since including these will affect your entire Display and Video inventory across the different campaign types in your account. Learn more about How to use brand suitability features in Performance Max.
- IP Exclusions won't be available in your Performance Max campaign.
Note:
- If you’re upgrading Display campaigns that included in-video content exclusions, those exclusions will not carry over to your Performance Max campaigns. Learn how to Set content exclusions for Display campaigns.
- If your Display campaign includes more than 20,000 placement exclusions, you will not be able to move your placement exclusions from your Display campaign to your new Performance Max campaign. The maximum number of placement exclusions supported at the account level is 65,000.
Unsupported targeting
Performance Max automatically optimizes targeting to improve performance in the ever-changing advertising landscape. Because Performance Max campaigns may show ads to relevant audiences outside of the signals you provide, based on the Google AI that will help you meet your performance goals, certain more restrictive targeting is not supported in your new Performance Max campaign. These include:
- Positive targeting like keyword, topic, and placement targeting
- Device targeting for operating system, device models, network, or browser
- Exclusions for affinity and in-market segments, life events, and topics
- Geographic locations based on Areas of Interest, which are no longer available for any campaign type. Learn more About advanced location options.
You’ll spend less time on targeting, so you can have more time to focus on ad assets that really appeal to your audience.
How to upgrade a Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign
Note: When you upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign, the existing Display campaign is marked with the “Removed” status and your new Performance Max campaign is created. Learn more About campaign statuses.
If you think that you may also want to run your Display campaign as it was before you upgraded it to a Performance Max campaign, make a copy of the existing Display campaign before upgrading it. Then you’ll be able to turn that copy of the campaign into a new Display campaign, while also easily upgrading the existing Display campaign into a Performance Max campaign. Learn how to Copy and paste campaigns, ad groups, ads, audiences and keywords.
There are 3 ways to do this:
- From the notifications in your Google Ads account
- From the “Recommendations” page
- From the inline recommendations shown on your campaign page
Upgrade from the notifications in your Google Ads account
- In your Google Ads account, go to the top-right corner and click the notifications icon
.
- Select the “Upgrade your Display campaigns” notification and click Apply.
- When you get a confirmation, click Apply all to confirm.
Upgrade from the “Recommendations” page
- In your Google Ads account, go to the Recommendationspage.
- Click View Recommendations and select the checkbox
alongside every campaign you want to update.
- Select Apply all in the “Upgrade to Performance Max” recommendation to upgrade all campaigns in one click.
- In the confirmation modal, click Apply all.
Upgrade from your campaigns page
- In your campaigns page, you might find a notification recommending you to upgrade to Performance Max on the right side of the page.
- Click View to review the conversion benefits the upgrade will give you.
- Click Apply all to upgrade your Display campaign to a Performance Max campaign.
FAQs
- From the notifications in your Google Ads account
- From the “Recommendations” page
- From the notifications in your “Campaign” page
Wider availability is expected later in 2023.
No. If you’re using Performance Max campaigns, excluding or targeting specific inventory isn’t possible. Performance Max focuses on your goals to help you drive more conversions or conversion value across Google's full range of advertising channels and inventory.
It’s important to add accurate goals and conversion data to help steer performance and ensure that your campaign’s optimized for the right things. Even if one channel or specific inventory placement may outperform another across auctions, that may not be the case in a specific auction.
Performance Max campaigns allow all account-level placement exclusions. Campaign-level placement exclusions aren’t available yet.
Your ads can be excluded from being placed in specific pages, sites, mobile apps, and videos where you don't want them to be shown. However, this placement exclusion feature can negatively impact your campaign’s performance as it limits serving. Placement exclusion is recommended only for brand safety, like excluding websites and mobile apps that aren’t appropriate for your brand. Learn how to Exclude placements at the account level.
