Boost your Search and Display results in Performance Max campaigns

July 25, 2023

To help you guide Google AI, we want to make it easy for you to provide inputs that tell Performance Max what matters—or doesn’t matter—to your business. Today, we’re introducing additional ways to multiply your results across channels. With these improvements, more advertisers are shifting single-channel campaigns to a unified campaign strategy in Performance Max to improve ROI and fully optimize performance across channels. For advertisers who are interested and eligible, self-upgrade tools are also rolling out now to easily upgrade Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns and Google Display campaigns to Performance Max.

Get the best of keywordless AI technology for Search

Last month, Performance Max fully launched campaign-level brand exclusions, which prevent your campaign from serving Search and Shopping ads on traffic that mentions or is related to the brands you select. You’ll also have more control over results from Search inventory with page feeds, where you can specify the landing page URLs you want to send traffic to at the asset group level, or exclude URLs at the campaign level. 

Advertisers who upgrade DSA campaigns to Performance Max see an average increase of over 15% in conversions and conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS.1 This performance holds even if they have existing Performance Max campaigns.

Eligible advertisers can use our tool via the recommendations page to follow an easy and guided process to self-upgrade single-channel Dynamic Search Ads to Performance Max.

Note

Dynamic Search Ads will continue to be fully available for you to use.

 

"At Shopee, we are always looking for new ways to improve our platform and services to better serve users. Upgrading to Performance Max has allowed us to access the latest keywordless AI technology to drive better results on Search, leading to an 11% lift in conversions at a 5% lower CPA. This enables us to run effective campaigns that connect users to our sellers, enhancing their overall shopping experience." 
— Fang Fang, Global Head of Online Marketing

 

"By transitioning DSA campaigns into Performance Max, we’re bringing them into the modern world of Google’s advertising tools and best practices. Newly-upgraded campaigns will have the new ability to leverage audience signals, test out new inventory, bid to customer acquisition goals, and better tailor ad copy to user intent. We’re looking forward to using the upgrade tool to easily transition clients at scale."
— Matt Bowen, Associate Director of Strategy, Enterprise Client Services


By upgrading to Performance Max, you’ll be able to use new features like inventory-aware ad serving. It makes sure your out-of-stock pages don’t serve with Search ads by automatically factoring in your product inventory–with no work required on your end. Google AI in Performance Max will also use your campaign’s creative assets as a helpful signal to find more converting search queries. This is especially beneficial if your landing pages have sparse or minimal content.

And using automatically created assets, Performance Max customizes your entire Search ad to better match consumer intent. Soon, automatically created text assets will also appear in your asset reporting table. You’ll have even more control than before with the option to remove text assets, as needed.

To see how different search terms are driving performance, check your search term insights from the Insights page in Google Ads. Improvements are rolling out now to include more search categories and give you the ability to apply date ranges and download the insights. Soon, these insights will also be available via the Google Ads API.

Take your AI-powered Display campaigns to the next level

Display advertisers already using AI-powered features can now multiply results even further across channels with Performance Max. 

Advertisers who upgrade Google Display campaigns to Performance Max see an average increase of over 20% in conversions at a similar or lower CPA.2 This performance holds even if they have existing Performance Max campaigns.

Performance Max will help you reach valuable audiences more effectively across channels—including Display and beyond. You can fine-tune performance by using audience signals to share your understanding of the most important audiences to engage, while still allowing Google AI to expand beyond these to help you find new audiences. 
 

“We upgraded our Display campaigns to Performance Max and achieved unprecedented growth, with a 47% increase in conversions while maintaining a healthy CPA. This was due to Performance Max's ability to reach a wider audience with more relevant ads, as well as its use of Google AI to optimize our campaigns in real time across channels”
— Leonardo Martins, Marketing Superintendent

 

More ways to improve your audience strategies

Performance Max also makes it easier to implement audience strategies by selecting goals built directly into the campaign like new customer acquisition. Later this year, you’ll be able to use new re-engagement goals in Performance Max to help retain existing customers. Rather than manually managing complex user lists and exclusions, tap into Google’s ability to automatically distinguish new customers from existing ones. Combine this with your first-party data from Customer Match lists and the Google tag to improve accuracy. 

Google AI learns from you, while you can also discover new things about your customers and performance. Use audience insights to understand your top-converting customers, and see which assets resonate the most with them using asset audience insights.  


Eligible advertisers can now easily self-upgrade Google Display campaigns to Performance Max within Google Ads using the tool and guided process from the recommendations page or account notifications.

Note

Google Display campaigns will continue to be fully available for you to use.

Best practices for upgrading your campaigns

For eligible campaigns, we recommend using the tool and following the guided self-upgrades to ensure your new Performance Max campaigns are set up correctly to drive success from the start. Each campaign you upgrade will become a new, separate Performance Max campaign that uses settings and learnings from your existing campaigns to maintain consistent performance. 

If you’d like to manually upgrade your campaigns on your own by creating a new Performance Max campaign or moving your budget into an existing Performance Max campaign, make sure to keep your campaign settings and configuration consistent. Learn more about consolidating your campaigns.

Note

Select campaigns with sufficient conversion volume and budget will also be eligible to A/B test the impact of upgrading Dynamic Search Ads or Display campaigns to Performance Max using experiments

Performance Max will continue using the best of Google AI technology to help you find valuable customers across channels and drive better business results. To set your Performance Max campaigns up for success, check out the best practices guide

Posted by Brandon Ervin, Director of Search Ads and Jyoti Vaidee, Director of Display Ads

 

 

1. Google Data, Global, Ads, December 2022 - January 2023
2. Google Data, Global, Ads, February - May 2023

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