Executive VP of Digital Marketing and Analytics, David Wilson provides insights into Performance Max campaigns and how our team at Zozimus has optimized this campaign style to maximize client reach and boost performance.
Marketing Automation and Performance Max Campaigns
Paid advertising has become increasingly more complex over the last couple of years with Marketing Automation, AI and Machine Learning. Our Zozimus paid media team is finding great success integrating Google’s Performance Max into our advertising campaigns, including a significant reduction in cost per conversions since implementing these style campaigns.
What is Performance Max?
Performance Max is an automated, cross-channel campaign that Google released out of beta in late 2021. Performance Max allows you to run integrated campaigns across all Google Ads channels: YouTube, Display, Google Search, Discover app, Google Maps, and Gmail; all in a single campaign.
To start, you create asset groups within Performance Max that are a combination of video, image, and text. Google then takes these asset groups and mixes and matches them using audience signals, conversion goals, and advertising objectives to create compelling ads that are most likely to result in conversions.
Based on machine learning, ads are shown to people whose online behavior indicates a high likelihood of conversion and serves the asset combination most likely to achieve that conversion.
What Are Asset Groups?
Asset groups are the collection of creative assets that are run against a given audience. For example, if you wanted to differentiate the creative for Men 18-35 and Women 18-35 we would create two separate asset groups.
Each asset group can contain 20 images, 4 logos, 3 videos, 5 long headlines (90 characters), 1 short description (60 characters), and 4 standard descriptions (90 characters).
To optimize, Google will tell you which assets are performing well and which ones are underperforming. The underperforming assets are then traded out for higher performing images, videos, and text creative.
What Are Audience Signals?
Audience signals are the segments that comprise the target audience. Based on this starter audience, Google can optimize for your conversion goal as well as find other audience segments that are likely to resonate with your ads.
Performance Max uses audience signals to determine optimal targeting and placement. Google will only show your ads outside of your designated audiences when there is a high likelihood of generating conversions and helping achieve performance goals.
What is Asset Performance?
After ads have generated enough performance data, Google will rank them as “Low”, “Good”, or “Best”. If enough data is not yet available, the performance ranking will default to “pending”.
How We Improve Campaign Performance
The best way to improve Performance Max campaigns is to provide as many assets as possible that can be tested. We typically start a campaign using images, text creative, and videos that have performed well historically.
Most companies have plenty of text/search assets for different campaigns, but we find that having access to images and videos can greatly help improve the success of a Performance Max campaign.
It is also critical to define conversions that are aligned with the strategic goals of the campaign so that the AI informing your bidding, audience targeting, ad serving, and asset ranking is correctly trained to achieve the desired results.
Performance Max Results
The Zozimus paid media team has been using Performance Max to run cross-channel campaigns for clients since late in 2021. What we have seen across multiple clients and multiple industries is that cost per conversions have typically been 50-70% lower since we started using Performance Max.
Want to see how Performance Max can boost your paid media results? Connect with us today.
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