Performance Max uses Google AI to help you drive growth in conversions and value through bidding, targeting, creatives, and attribution. It's designed to perform across a wide range of marketing objectives and media channels. Because of this, we recommend using the following best practices to help set up your Performance Max campaigns for store goals for success and optimal results.
This article explains best practices for Performance Max campaigns for store goals
For additional best practices, review:
- Best practices for all business types
- Best practices for online sales (non-shopping)
- Best practices for lead generation
- Best practices for retail advertisers with online sales goals using a Merchant Center feed
Campaign set up
- Campaign duration: 30 days recommended minimum. However, you can run shorter campaigns for seasonal events like Back-to-School, Black Friday, or Mother's Day.
- Store visits: The campaign must be set up within an account that's already active and eligible for store visits regardless of Google channel.
- Local actions: Advertisers who aren't eligible for store visits can optimize towards local actions, which includes contacts and direction clicks.
- Store sales: The campaign must be set up within an account that’s already allowlisted for store sales improvements, and that’s active and eligible for store visits and store sales across all eligible channels.
- Not all accounts are eligible for store sales. Learn more About store sales eligibility.
- Number of business locations per account: It’s recommended that you have a minimum of 10 business locations in campaigns with store visits or store sales. For campaigns with local actions, it’s recommended that you have a minimum of 5 business locations.
- Conversion values: Set conversion values for each goal applied to your campaigns (for example, store visits = $25 USD and calls = $10 USD).
Account ID or campaign setup
The requirements and recommendations are at an account level. If required, you can create multiple campaigns as long as the requirements are met at an account level.
Example: You can create 5 individual Performance Max campaigns with store visits, each assigned a $200 USD budget per day, with 2 stores per campaign, and a 30 day campaign duration.
Reporting
- Actions: Visits and local actions will be reported by individual store location and provided in per store performance insights to your customers.
- Store sales reporting: Store sales reporting is currently only available at the campaign level.
- Measuring campaign success: When assessing the success of the campaign, compare against other performance-oriented campaigns with the same conversion action. If a competitive benchmark is required, compare other offline media (for example, print, radio, flyers, and TV) with offline objectives.
- Performance evaluation time: Wait for 1-2 complete conversion cycles before fully evaluating your campaign performance and adjusting targets to allow users to complete longer offline conversion cycles and for them to surface in your offline reporting.
