One of the most common goals among advertisers is to encourage customers to visit your physical storefront. Store goals are designed to help you advertise on Google properties, like Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and the Google Display Network that generate offline business.
This article explains how to create your Performance Max campaign with a goal to drive offline visits and sales using store visits, store sales, call clicks, or direction clicks. Learn more About Performance Max for store goals.
Performance Max is powered by Google AI to generate campaign settings that help you get more value from your advertising. As you create your campaign, you may receive notifications about issues that could affect performance. Use the campaign construction navigation menu to review and resolve these issues. Learn more about how to Set up your campaign for success.
On this page
- Create your campaign and choose a goal
- Set your bidding preferences
- Set your campaign settings
- Set up your asset group and assets
- Set your budget
- Review and publish your campaign
Before you begin
Setting up a Performance Max campaign for store goals
- You’ll need to define the store locations you want to promote. You can set this by linking your Business Profile or selecting affiliate locations.
- Provide store locations, campaign budget, and ad assets. Using these inputs, Google AI will optimize bids, ad placements, and asset combinations.
- Your ads will be eligible to appear across Google's properties. This includes the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network.
- Performance Max campaigns for store goals are designed to help businesses provide potential customers information they need to decide when and how to visit stores.
Instructions
If you have a “Local store visits and promotions” goal, follow the steps below to create a Performance Max campaign. If you’re unfamiliar with conversion tracking, review Set up conversion tracking for your website before you set up your goals.
Step 1 of 6: Create your campaign and choose a goal
- In your Google Ads account, click the create button
, then select Campaign.
- Choose “Local store visit and promotions” as your campaign objective.
- Select Performance Max as your campaign type.
- Confirm the conversion goals (store visits, contacts (Google hosted), or directions for store goals) for your campaign. Your account goals will be automatically populated, but you can remove the default goals or add new goals based on your desired outcome.
- Note: You can select “Local store visits and promotions” or “Sales” as your account or campaign goals, but you can’t select both at the same time. If you’d like to switch between goals, make sure to first add a non-store conversion goal, then remove the existing store conversion goal before adding the desired store conversion goal. You can remove the non-store goal afterwards.
- Accounts eligible for store visits won’t be able to remove store visits as a goal in the “Local store visits and promotions” campaign creation option. If you want to optimize towards only local actions (contacts or directions), despite being eligible for store visits (recommended), select Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.
- Under “Add locations to this campaign”, select the location groups you want to use for your campaign.
- For Business Profile, you can target all locations in the account by selecting Use all locations (# listing). You can target a subset of store locations by selecting Use location groups. Use an existing location group or create a new location group by selecting New location group. Learn more About location groups and filtering.
- For affiliate locations, choose an existing location group or create a new one. To target all locations within an affiliate location asset, select Use all locations (# listings). To target a subset of locations from the asset, select Use location groups. Learn more about how to Create and manage location groups.
- Important: Geographic targeting will be inferred based on the physical business locations specified for your campaign, and therefore is not recommended when store goals are applied. If needed, you can exclude certain geographic locations from your campaign.
- (Optional) If you’ve turned on local inventory ads and you want to advertise in-store products, check the “Also advertise in-store products” box and select a Merchant Center account.
- (Optional) Select the specific feed that you want to use from the Merchant Center account by feed label or country of sale.
- Enter a campaign name.
- Select Continue.
, then select Campaign.Keep in mind
- Update or remove irrelevant or stale goals: You should update conversion goals to improve performance and to avoid continually removing them from your targeted goals. Click the 3-dot icon
to edit or remove irrelevant goals, or go to “Conversions” to update your account-level conversion goals.
- Set conversion values: Set conversion values for different goals or when each conversion is worth a different amount to your business. For example, if your campaign is optimized towards both phone calls and website actions, you can set the value for phone calls as your average sale order value. Google AI will optimize for goals with the highest ROAS.
- Advertisers using store sales measurement are able to receive dynamic store sales conversion value reporting where eligible but we still recommend updating the default conversion value which may be used in some cases. Learn more About store sales measurement.
to edit or remove irrelevant goals, or go to “Step 2 of 6: Set your bidding preferences
- In the “Bidding” section, select a bid strategy.
- Conversions: If you check the checkbox for “Set a target cost per action”, the campaign will try to meet the Target CPA you enter.
- Conversion Value: If you check the checkbox for “Set a target return on ad spend”, the campaign will try to meet the Target ROAS you enter.
- Under "Customer acquisition", check the "Adjust your bidding to help you gain new customers" checkbox if you want to refine your target audience, regardless of bid strategy. Learn more About the new customer acquisition goal.
- Note: To bid for new customers, you'll need to include an audience segment with at least 1,000 active members in at least one network.
- If you choose to optimize your store goals campaign for acquiring new customers, note that the campaign will serve to new customers based on:
- Past online purchase conversions.
- Existing customer lists shared through “Customer Match”.
You can find details of new customer acquisition in the “Conversions Summary Acquisition” panel. Note that the only new customer acquisition mode that’s compatible with store goals is the "New customer only" mode. If you select the "New customer value" mode, the campaign will not optimize towards new customer acquisition and will run as a standard Performance Max campaign.
- Choose Next to go to “Campaign settings”.
Set your bid strategy
Based on your goals, Performance Max will help set the right bids for every auction to optimize your campaign.
- If you’re tracking values with your conversions, it’s recommended that you use the “Maximize conversion values” bid strategy.
- If you aren’t tracking values and care about all of your conversions equally, consider the “Maximize conversions” bid strategy.
- If you want your campaign to try to meet your Target ROAS, select "Maximize Conversion Values" and check the checkbox for "Set a target return on ad spend".
- If you want your campaign to try to meet your Target CPA, select "Maximize Conversions" and check the checkbox for "Set a target cost per action".
Learn how to Choose your bid and budget.
Step 3 of 6: Set your campaign settings
Note: Before you finalize your campaign settings, keep in mind the following guidelines:
- Location targeting isn’t recommended for campaigns optimized to “Local store visits and promotions”.
- Ad scheduling isn’t available in construction for campaigns with store goals applied, and isn’t recommended to be added post-construction.
- When only store goals (store visits, store sales, contacts, and direction clicks) are added to a campaign, Final URL expansion will not be supported.
- On the “Campaign settings” page, select the locations to target under “Locations”.
- To target a location that isn’t listed, select Enter another location, enter the name of the place you want to target, then select Target or Exclude.
- If you want to target specific places within a location, select Nearby and again select Target or Exclude locations.
- Under the “Languages” dropdown, select the languages your customers speak. You can select multiple languages to show your ads to specific sets of customers.
- Note: For more location targeting options, use “Advanced search”. You can add location in bulk or enter a location and radius around that specific location that you'd like to target.
- Finalize any additional settings you’d like to set up under “More settings”. Click Next.
Turn on automatically created assets
If you keep automatically created assets selected, Performance Max campaigns may auto-generate assets if Google AI predicts that your campaign performance can be improved. Google AI curates text and images from your landing pages and shows them in your ads when it’s predicted to improve performance. Then, you can add information like brand colors to help your campaign look more personalized.
If both the automatically created assets settings (text assets and Final URL) in Google Ads are checked and turned on for your campaign, your final URL may be replaced with a more relevant domain based on customer intent , that uses a dynamic headline, description, and creative assets from your landing page’s content. By turning this feature on, you can increase your campaign’s ability to serve.
More settings
You can set up ad scheduling, campaign start and end dates, and URL settings under “More settings”.
Ad scheduling
Use ad scheduling to determine the number of days and hours your ad will show. For some goals, you may want your ad to only show during business hours or when you are available to handle customer inquiries.
- Learn more About ad scheduling.
- Learn how to Create an ad schedule.
Exclude brand traffic
You can prevent your Performance Max campaign ads from serving for specific brand searches (including misspellings) by creating a Brand list in your account and applying it to your Performance Max campaign.
Learn more About brand settings for Search and Performance Max.
Campaign URL options
The tracking template is where you put tracking information. Performance Max only supports the account-level or campaign-level tracking template. Any tracking template at the lower level, such as ad group or product group, will be automatically removed.
You can use URL parameters within the template to customize your final URL. When an ad is clicked, the information is used to create your landing page URL.
Step 4 of 6: Set up your asset group and assets
- On the “Asset group” page, enter a unique asset group name.
- Build your asset group using the guidelines below.
- Click Next.
| Asset | Recommended asset guidelines |
|---|---|
|
Image |
Add up to 15 images |
| Logos | Add up to 5 logos |
| Videos |
If you don't upload a video, Google may auto-generate one from your other assets. To opt out of auto-generated video, upload a video during campaign construction or launch. In either instance, Google will automatically resize your video ads to increase performance and improve ad strength across platforms. Remember that if you don’t plan to upload a video, you’ll need to consider how creative assets in an auto-generated video might appear if resized. If you don't have a video, use the Google Ads video creation tool to create one while remembering the following guidelines.
|
| Headlines (maximum 30 characters) | Add up to 5 headlines |
| Long headlines (maximum 90 characters) | Add up to 5 long headlines |
| Descriptions |
Short description (maximum 60 characters)
|
|
Long description (maximum 90 characters)
*Long descriptions aren’t supported in local formats. |
|
| Call to action | Select a call to action that aligns with your goals such as “sign up” or “subscribe”. |
| Business name | Add the name of your business or brand, which appears in the text of your ad. |
| Ad URL options | Add the pathway for your display URL and choose a different final URL for mobile. |
| Final URL | With Final URL expansion turned on, Google may replace your Final URL with a more relevant landing page based on user search queries. Google may also generate dynamic headlines, descriptions, and assets to match your landing page. Learn more About automatically created assets. |
| Custom labels |
Note: This setting will only show for accounts with page feeds set up and a page feed attached to the campaign. Learn more about setting up page feeds. To include certain URLs from page feeds in your Performance Max campaign ads, specify custom labels from your feed to indicate which URLs should be used. When Final URL expansion is turned on in your Performance Max campaign, page feeds help to verify that we’re indexing the provided URLs, but your campaign may serve other landing pages than those in just the page feed. |
to learn more about the requirements.You can create one asset group before launching your Performance Max campaign and additional asset groups after setup. Your assets will automatically be assembled into all applicable formats and show the most relevant ad creative.
Audience signals
Audience signals allow you to add audience suggestions that help Google Ads automation optimize for your selected goals. Although adding audience signals is optional, using audience signals can help you accelerate and guide Google AI on the ideal way to optimize your campaign.
Remember that Performance Max campaigns may show ads to relevant audiences outside of your signals if they have a strong likelihood of converting to help you meet your performance goals.
- Learn more about how to Build audience signals.
- Learn more about how to Use the Audience builder to reach the right audience for each campaign and ad group.
Ad strength
Ad strength is an indication of the relevance and range of your ad creative combinations. Having more relevant and unique content can help you get the right ad in front of your customers and improve your ad’s performance.
Video creation in Google Ads
You can either upload your own videos during campaign creation or use the free Google Ads video creation service to create horizontal or vertical videos for your campaigns. If you don't have a video asset, and you don't want to use auto-generate videos, consider using the video creation tool. To create a video in Google Ads, choose a template from the Asset Library and upload the following items:
- Branding elements like a logo or brand colors
- Images like product or lifestyle pictures
- Video-friendly messaging
When you create your video, Google will automatically resize your video ads to increase performance and improve ad strength across platforms. Remember that you can also crop or refocus images in Google Ads before you create and upload your video to a designated YouTube channel for use in a campaign. Learn more about how to Create a Video campaign.
Step 5 of 6: Set your budget
Your budget establishes a monthly charging limit for an individual campaign. The charging limit is the average daily budget that you set, multiplied by the average number of days in a month. While your spend may vary each day, you won’t pay more than your monthly charging limit. Learn more About spending limits.
For Performance Max you should:
- Set an average daily budget of at least 3 times your CPA or cost/conv. for the conversion actions selected for your campaign. You have the flexibility to change your budget at any time.
- Check your account daily to know how your campaigns have performed so far.
- Remember that on days when your ads are likely to get you more traffic, you may spend up to 2 times your average daily budget. Those days are balanced by the days when your spend is below your average daily budget.
Step 6 of 6: Review and publish your campaign
Before you finish setting up your campaign, you'll be taken to a review summary with the details of your new campaign. Select Publish Campaign to complete the process.
