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Performance deep dive
- Review where your ads were served, uncover the factors that contributed to performance shifts, and glean insights on how to optimize your campaigns.
- See what factors are driving your performance with top signals in your bid strategy report. Top signals may include, but are not limited to: device type, location, day of week, time of day, queries, and Customer Match lists.
- Check out performance shifts on the Insights page to see what assets groups, product groups, and products are driving the campaign’s performance changes.
- Review channel-level performance results in the channel performance report to understand how each channel helps to achieve your campaign’s goal.
- See how changes you’ve made to your account may lead to performance fluctuations using change history insights.
- Gain insight into large changes in your campaign performance and recommended actions to fix issues by exploring the explanations page. Unlike Performance Shifts which focus on what asset and product groups are driving performance, explanations focus on why your performance changed and often provide recommendations to improve campaigns.
- See how competitor ad strategies are impacting your business by checking out auction insights to see how shifts in the visibility of your competitors above or below you on the Search network may have impacted your performance. This insight also shows new competitors entering and leaving the auction.
- Review landing page performance on the landing pages page which can help you identify what pages your customers interact with the most, and find which of your pages aren’t optimized for mobile users
- See where your ads have served using Performance Max placement reports. These reports give you more transparency and assurance around where your ads are showing.
- A/B test different features, settings, and campaigns by setting up Performance Max experiments.
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Channel-level performance evaluation
- Evaluate channel-level insights for Performance Max with the channel performance report.
- Check out the three components of the channel performance report to help advertisers understand how Performance Max is performing across channels:
- Performance summary provides a snapshot of Performance Max campaign performance.
- Channel-to-goals visualization shows how Performance Max performs across channels to achieve your goals, including metrics like impressions, interactions, and conversions.
- You can segment data by video or product feed ad formats in both reports to learn how each ad format is impacting performance.
- Channel distribution table delivers you a more granular view of your Performance Max channel results, including clicks, conversions, cost, and more.
- Diagnostics will automatically surface insights in the “Status” column, highlighting potential problem areas and how to improve them. For example, you might find that you’re limited on Search because your landing pages aren’t as relevant to consumer search queries as they could be. As a result, you could activate the final URL expansion feature and use Google AI to choose landing pages that are a better match for user intent.
- You can also download the data in this table into a spreadsheet for easier sharing outside of the Ads interface.
- Evaluate your channel performance.
- The concept of marginal ROI is foundational to how cross-channel bid optimization works for Performance Max. This is defined as the additional return-on-investment you get from additional spend.
- Performance Max uses the full power of Google AI across channels to deliver the next conversion at the best ROI possible in a given auction, some of which may be lower/higher than your average ROI. Your next highest-ROI conversion could come from a channel that you hadn’t even considered.
- Even if a channel has a lower overall average ROI compared to others on average and across all auctions, it may still be the best performing channel with the highest marginal ROI within a single auction. That's why, looking at the average return from one channel especially over short timeframes doesn't tell the full story.
- Identify channels with strong performance & potential areas of improvement after diving into channel-level performance. For example, a local plumbing business might discover that Maps is a key driver of leads, so they focus on optimizing their Google Business Profile, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information. Or an electronics retailer might observe that their Performance Max campaign is seeing month-over-month revenue growth from YouTube, so they decide to invest in new video creative to capitalize on the strong performance.
- Improve channel-level performance with general best practices.
- Ensure asset groups have an Ad Strength of “Good” or “Excellent” by implementing ad creative best practices to achieve optimal performance across inventory types.
- Maximize best practices on the campaign-level and grow your campaign
- Follow best practices and optimization tips according to your business type, goals, and marketing objectives to set up your campaign for optimal results.
- Ensure your campaign is not limited by budget to engage with more customers, effectively and at scale.
- Troubleshoot and take action on channel performance reporting using these steps.
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Audience trends
- Understand more about the users interacting with your ads and glean insights on how to convert those users into customers.
- Learn more about your customers by looking at audience insights to see which audiences are converting at higher rates. The ”Signals” label next to an audience segment shows you which segments are converting that you input as audience signals yourself.
Tip
Focus on segments labeled as “Optimized” to learn the new audience segments that Google AI helped discover for you and inform your broader business strategy.
- Identify growth opportunities based on upcoming predicted demand for the products and services you offer with demand forecasts that show future trends relevant to your unique business that are expected to start over the next 180 days.
- Find your customer acquisition cost with customer acquisition cost reporting. If you’re using new customer acquisition goals, you can add a column to your campaign-level reporting to see how many new customers you’re driving and what the cost of acquiring these new customers is.
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Creative evaluation
- Evaluate creative performance to determine which assets are resonating or ways to improve the ones that are underperforming.
- Understand how each asset group is contributing to your overall campaign performance using asset group reporting, where you can customize columns to show conversions, spend, click-through rate, and more. If you're looking to increase conversions for a specific asset group, focus on adding relevant creative assets to the asset group, and make sure you reach “Excellent” Ad Strength.
- Determine which creative assets are performing well using asset reporting. Asset reporting lets you see how your assets are driving performance for your campaign. You can see metrics like conversions, cost, impressions, click, conversion value/cost, and more. Use this data to understand which asset types and themes drive the most impact so you can prioritize what to build next and maximize your asset variety and Ad Strength.
Tip
To optimize performance, follow Ad Strength best practices at the asset group level. In your asset group, check if your Ad Strength is “Excellent”, “Good”, “Average”, or “Poor”. Aim for an “Excellent” rating by adding a diverse range of high-quality assets by following Ad Strength’s guidance. If you have the maximum number of assets, consider replacing lower-performing assets with the help of assets metrics to help Google AI create more effective ad combinations.
 Advertisers who improve Ad Strength from “Poor” to “Excellent” on median see an increase of 6% in conversions/conversion value at a similar cost per action (CPA)/return on ad spend (ROAS) in their Performance Max campaigns. 1
Tip
View the “Combinations” tab to see which combinations of assets have performed best. This can provide useful insight into what types of creative assets your customers respond to best to help inform what future assets to upload, as well as your broader creative strategy.
- See which assets are resonating most with different audience segments with asset audience insights. Use this insight to help generate new creative assets to attract high-performing audiences.
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Search impact
- Understand how Performance Max is leveraging user intent through Search to deliver results, forecast demand trends, and highlight areas of opportunity.
- See what people are searching for when you show an ad by checking out the search terms report with the same granular Search term data and capabilities previously only available in Search and Shopping campaigns.
Tip
You can use this information to create new text assets geared towards your highest-performing search terms.
Tip
If you find Search terms that don’t align with your business, you can consider adding them as a negative keyword, either at the campaign or account level, or as a brand exclusion. You should keep monitoring performance to make sure your exclusions are not limiting your reach or negatively impacting performance.
- Understand what your target customers are searching for with Search terms insights by seeing which current search categories and search terms are converting at higher rates. You can also see whether queries are coming from Performance Max’s keywordless targeting, or from the search themes you’ve added.
Tip
Use the source column in search terms insights to see where your queries are coming from.
- Review how “useful” your search themes are with the search themes usefulness indicator that shows if the search themes you provided are driving incremental traffic on top of what Performance Max would find on its own, or whether you’d benefit from updating your search themes.
- Determine if you are keeping up with increased demand in current and recommended categories relevant to your business by reviewing Search trends. Use this insight to plan budgets, inventory, promotions, and landing pages based on trending customer search interest.
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Tips for specific goals
Online Sales with a Google Merchant Center Feed
- Use product insights or category insights on the Products page in Google Ads to identify product-level optimization opportunities based on market potential, and apply changes more easily with actionable recommendations. With the diagnostics tab, you can also uncover and fix issues that may be impacting the performance of individual products.
- View your most popular products in the best sellers report in Google Merchant Center. You can use this report to understand demand for brands and products, and prioritize which products to show in advertising campaigns.
- Use the price competitiveness report in Google Merchant Center to analyze how competitors are pricing similar products by category, country, and brand. Use this information to improve your pricing and bidding strategies on top products.
Store Visits
- Ensure your business is eligible for store visits data then review store visit reporting to measure how Google Ads interactions impact visits to your business’s physical locations.
Tip
Measure campaign success by comparing it 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.
- Assign a store visit value or use store sales values to measure the full purchase journey and optimize your campaign to drive more purchases in stores. You can also create custom variables for store sales to access more granular reporting by customer segment or product category, for example.
- Segment your conversions data to show store visits to understand where the conversion you’re measuring happened at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level.
Travel Goals
- Use the hotels tab to review performance metrics and traffic by hotel property to get an idea of traveler demand across locations.
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