How to Optimize Your Performance Max Campaigns in Google Ads

If you’ve recently set up a Performance Max campaign, you may be thinking that there are not many ways to optimize your performance. However, there are many different ways you can set up and optimize your performance max campaign to get the most out of your data, insights and results. Of course, you want Google to be able to do its job and get you the results you are looking for. There is a catch, though. Google’s Algorithm will be able to do a better job with stronger data. The data you provide, like audience signlas, creative, and tracking will all help Google do its job.

What is Valuable to You?

In order to get the most out of your Performance Max Campaigns, you have to be properly tracking conversions. Depending on the type of business you are running, this will be the biggest decider on what type of conversions you are tracking for. For example, if you are an eCommerce business you may be interested in tracking purchases, add to carts and complete checkouts. You will then also have to choose what your bid strategy is. Do you want to maximize conversions? Or, are you trying to build awareness with maximize clicks?

Here are some things you will want to consider as you go about building your Performance Max Campaign.

Bid strategy

As an agency, we have found that running a big strategy starting with Maximize Conversions allows the system to gather data quickly and effectively. Doing this allows your campaign to aquire historical data that will be vital to optimizing your campaign. After letting this run for a while there are a number of other things you can do like adding in target CPA or even switching to Maximize Conversion Value with a TargetROAS.

Sometimes you will find that you are spending your budget daily and being told that your budget is limited. If this is the case, we typically suggest that you decrease bids and optimize your keywords before spending more. If you have done all of the optimizing you can and you have more money in your marketing budget, then you can feel more comfortable spending more.

Audience Targeting

As with any marketing campaign, you will want to make sure that your marketing goals are closely aligned with who you are targeting. You will want to have a clear idea of your customer avatar. Providing strong data and insight to Google will allow you to better aquire leads and conversion. Some things you can add to your Google Ads Account and Performance Max Campaign to narrow down your audience are:

• Website Visitors: Those who have purchased, added to cart, website viewers

• Customer Match: Import customer lists, email + SMS subscribers

Creative assets

One of the strongest indicators of success for a Performance Max campaign is having strong creative. Unlike Paid Search Marketing, Performance Max relies heavily on quality creative to get you to your goals. This is very similar to Paid Social - Creative is everything! If you are struggling with coming up with quality creative, there are some things that can help.

Google has come out with Ads Creative Studio to make it easier to create and manage your assets. In addition, they also have a Video Builder that is located in Google Ads that will let you create a video from one of their templates.

To get there just follow these steps:

Google Ads > Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Asset Library > Create Video

Landing pages

When analyzing your Google Ads Account, you may find that Google is sending traffic to a landing page that isn’t converting well. We all have pages on our website that don’t perform or convert as well as other pages. If this is the case, you can exclude these urls from your Performance Max Campaigns. To do this simply go to “Turn off URL Expansion Settings” and then go to “Additional Settings” and “Final URL Expansion”.

Scaling

Everyone wants to know the age old secret of how to scale a well performing Google Ads Campaign. We always suggest increasing the budget in 10-20% increments every 3-4 days. You don’t want to increase too frequently as this could reset the system.

Most of all, it is important to be patient. Performance Max needs time to do it’s job. We at Connecticut Coast Media suggest giving it 2-4 weeks before making any decisions on how your Performance Max Campaign is running, Small adjustments aren’t a problem, but you do want to give the algorithm time to optimize before you go and make too many changes.