The Performance Max campaign is the newest automated campaign type that runs across all Google Ads inventory. The new goals-based campaign combines search, display, shopping and video into one campaign with the idea that automation and AI will allow advertisers to target the right audience at the right time on the right platform.

This campaign type will allow advertisers to manage less campaigns to leave more time to focus on strategy performance decisions and overarching objectives rather than manual, time-consuming tasks as the campaign focuses on the most valuable inventory auctions for the business.

Google has suggested that advertisers can create conversion gains of up to 30% when using Performance Max machine learning with the DDA model (data driven attribution).

How to set up

It’s pretty simple to set up a Performance Max campaign. All an advertiser needs to do is provide the following 8 assets to launch.

1. Marketing objective/campaign goal

2. Assets - image, text, video

3. Feeds - Google My Business, dynamic and/or Google Merchant Centre

4. Signals - audiences/remarketing lists

5. Location targets

6. Language targets

7. CPA or ROAS target (optional)

8. Budget

Our take

We have only tested this campaign type on a handful of accounts and it seems that it’s still in the very early stages and has a lot of fine tuning to do by Google. On the whole, we’ve had mixed results from the campaigns so far with Performance Max outranking all other campaigns that are running alongside (likely so Google can gain more insights whilst in testing) despite Google stating that Performance Max can run in rotation with previous activity without significant fluctuations.

Until more developments have been made to improve performance and impression segmentation across all campaign types so they can run alongside each other, we will stick to the silo campaign management to gain more control over optimisations.