Google’s Performance Max Automated Campaigns – 4 Things To Be Careful With

Google introduced Performance Max (PMax) campaigns at Google Marketing Live in 2021. This new campaign type is believed to give marketers some much-needed boost in their advertising strategy through machine learning. Its primary objective is to generate qualified leads, drive online sales, and increase in-store visits all without needing to use Google Merchant Center product feed.

What are Performance Max Campaigns?

Performance Max Campaigns are the type of campaign that’s designed to be very adaptable as it utilizes a mixture of machine learning and automation to aid advertisers in executing specific conversion goals. Aside from that, it is designed to have a broad reach across Google’s network to reach customers through:

• Search
• Maps
• Shopping ad inventory
• Display
• Discover Feed
• YouTube
• Gmail

According to Google, “Performance Max campaigns puts your business goals front and center and allows our automation to target your business goals above all else. This is crucial in order to maximize performance from Google Ads!”

With PMax, you will need to choose a marketing objective and then decide on the conversion goals that support your objective. To ensure that your campaigns will be optimized to increase your ROI through automation, you need to assign more than one goal and various values to conversion to a single campaign. PMax campaigns use automated bidding and targeting technology with a focus on goals to ensure that you are able to invest your money efficiently and to spend it where you can have the highest ROI.

Conversion goals are divided into three categories:

Online Sales:

• Online purchase
• Begin checkout
• In-app purchase
• Add to cart
• Store sales
• Customer acquisition
• Loyalty sign up
• Subscription

Lead Generation

• Contact
• Request quote
• Outbound click
• Signup
• Lead form
• Get directions
• Phone call leads
• Imported lead
• Book appointment
• New customer acquisition

Offline Sales

• Local actions (direction and calls)
• Store sales
• Store visit

Google recommends using the same goals for all your performance campaigns, including PMax campaigns, to get the best value for your money with automation. This means that you need to set a consistent account-level goal.

What makes Performance Max Campaigns effective in improving your marketing efforts is that one, they break down segmentation between various channels to focus on a unified multi-channel digital marketing strategy, and two, they highlight the use of automation as a way of delegating tasks and the use of human brainpower on strategic and creative goals.

What are the benefits of using PMax Campaigns?

If one of your primary marketing objectives is to increase online sales and lead generation, maximize campaign performance without being limited by the channels your ads will appear on, as well as reach more people and have a higher conversion value, then you need Performance Max Campaigns.

Here are some of the compelling benefits that you can get from PMax campaigns.

· Reach out to more converting customers

With PMax campaigns, you’ll be able to customize the goals that truly matter to your organization and increase conversion value. You’ll also be able to engage with a wide audience across different Google channels. Plus, you can unlock new and unexpected customer agreements, thanks to Google’s real-time understanding of customer preferences and intents.

· Drive more value to your goals

Through the machine-learning models used in PMAx, you’ll be able to accurately predict which ads, audiences, and creative combinations would perform best. You’ll also be able to increase your conversions through data-driven attribution across channels.

· Get richer insights

Through PMAx’s asset reporting, you can better understand which creatives truly impact performance and help you optimize campaign creatives to increase ROI. Additionally, with new insights, you’ll be aware of the changes in performance so you can inform your broader business strategy.

What kinds of input do PMax campaigns use?

To begin automating ads on Google, you will need to provide the following:

• Marketing goals and objectives
• Budget
• Creative assets (text, videos, and images)
• Geo-targets
• Feeds (Google My Business, Google Merchant Center, Dynamic Ads feed, and Business data feeds)
• Audience signals (first-party audiences (i.e., remarketing lists) and Google audiences (including custom audiences)

This means that PMax campaigns are a significant simplification step since the same coverage would have previously required marketers to create a separate campaign for each channel, saving advertisers a lot of time and effort. This can be especially helpful to those new to digital marketing who may not have the time, experience, and skills to set up each and every campaign correctly. With PMax campaigns, they only need to create a single campaign and start seeing results, which should help them focus on optimizing aspects that have the highest ROI potential.

But, what could go wrong?

Just like any automation, PMax campaigns have their own capabilities and limitations. It’s important to note that PMax campaigns are not fully self-driving automation, but are more like assist features that require context to be able to fully function.

Here are some of the things that could possibly go wrong with Performance Max Campaigns.

1. Incomplete goals

With PMax as a new PPC automation, you need to make sure that you are clear about your specific goals. Telling PMAx to get leads would only limit what it can actually do for you. This is because you don’t want to have just as many leads as possible – you want to have leads that actually convert into paying customers. This is where you need tools that can help you create real values to steer this Google automation to know your specific goals and bring in better quality conversions.

2. Poorly optimized feeds

Google uses the data from the Merchant Feed to determine which searches are relevant to a particular business and then shows what it deems the best title, price, and image for each ad. However, your ads will fail to drive sales if your feed has incomplete data.

PMax doesn’t give you full control of keywords, bids, and creatives, which a lot of PPC pros recommend. However, other experts explain that modern PPC managers should not attempt to manage every single detail but rather know how to manage Google Ads from the outside using an automated system or PPC software.

3. Not leveraging first-party data

Google has already announced that it will completely phase-out third-party data in online advertising by 2023. This is why first-party data is gaining more traction since last year.

If you have a database of your existing customers, feed that first-party data into your Google Ads campaigns to improve targeting. Over time, Google AI could learn about which audience types would be best to target. But you can save thousands of dollars if you tell the system what it needs to do right from the start. Using PMax, you can bring any first-party data into a rule engine to automate decision-making involving your PPC campaigns.

4. Forgetting to write helpful ad components

Advertising on social media and other similar platforms requires you to write ads or posts that capture your audience’s attention.

With Google Performance Max Campaigns, you need to write unique value propositions and concise calls to action in the ad text components to help users find whatever it is they are looking for.

Conclusion

Performance Max Campaigns and machine learning algorithms will fully automate all advertising work with ad copy, bidding, targeting, and helping businesses make the most of their digital marketing strategy. This means that this campaign type will help you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to generate high-value leads across various Google channels.