Briefing

Providing advertisers the ability to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign, Google has prioritised the use of  Performance Max since its launch in November 2021.

With the industry’s move towards automation, after submitting assets and audience signals, Performance Max is another campaign type where advertisers have had little control over bidding, budget optimisation, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more.

But this is changing.

The next round of Performance Max updates offer more transparency from Google and give advertisers more control over performance and reporting.

The new Performance Max updates

Campaign Level Negatives

• An update that advertisers have been asking for, Campaign Level Negatives give the ability to add negative keywords at account level, helping advertisers to maintain brand control and exclude any areas that they don’t want to reach. 
• This also means account level negatives apply to all search and shopping campaigns (minus discovery).

Performance Max Experiments

• Experiments will allow advertisers to see how Performance Max campaigns impact their account as a whole. This allows advertisers to measure the true incrementality of using Performance Max.
• This will stop the cannibalisation of standard shopping campaign performance if run as a 50/50 split between the two campaigns.

Asset Group Reporting

• Advertisers will be able to see conversions, conversion value, cost and more metrics at asset group level. This is giving advertisers the ability to optimise budget and performance at a more granular level.

Video Creation Tools

• With a higher focus on video assets in marketing, video assets aren’t always accessible due to resources or time constraints.
• The introduction of the video creation tool will allow advertisers more control over video assets, hopefully creating better assets than ones generated from Google.

Page Feeds

• In the latest update, Google is going to be rolling out page feeds for Performance max. This will allow advertisers to direct traffic to specific URLs.
• It will also allow advertisers to group URLs by theme by using labels to make them easier to use for a specific campaign or asset group. 

Testing the new Performance Max features

Some features – Video Creation Tools, Campaign Level Negatives and Performance Max Experiments – are live and ready to be used in your campaign. The others are set to be rolled out in the coming months.

As a next step, begin testing these new features in your campaigns.

For example, with Campaign Level Negatives, you could test negating brand terms and seeing whether you can drive incremental sales without the help of brand terms. You could also run an uplift experiment to show how adding the Performance Max campaign to your account will increase conversions or conversion value.

Testing for Performance Max has been notoriously limited, so advertisers should jump on the chance to test these new features in a bid to take their performance to the next level.

If you have any questions or need specific recommendations, then please get in touch with our team today.