Google Ads Performance Max New Features & Best Practices

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Google Ads Performance Max New Features
  • Forecast the impact of Performance Max
    using Performance Planner
  • Use asset group scheduling to plan and
    organize your campaigns
  • Additional headlines
  • Explanations
  • First-party audience insights
• Google Ads Performance Max Holiday Best Practices
• Timing is Important
• Final Thoughts

Introduction

The Holiday Season is a busy time for advertisers as shoppers search for gifts across a variety of channels.

To help you make the most of this important period, Google is upgrading its Performance Max campaigns with a series of new features. With these improvements, you’ll be able to reach more shoppers and promote your holiday sales more effectively.
But, First things first, What is a Performance Max Campaign?
Performance Max is a fully automated Google Ads campaign driven by AI and machine learning that considers your inputs to ensure you meet your most essential performance goals.

Furthermore, because Performance Max is goal-based, you can be confident that your campaigns are aligned with your overall goals. Cool isn’t it?

Here are some key benefits of Performance Max campaigns:

• You can find More Customers Based on Your Objectives
• Gain Knowledge About Your Audience through Insights and Transparency
• Performance max product campaigns will be an effective tool for adapting to changing search trends and user behavior.

So if you’re looking to maximize your conversions this holiday season, be sure to take advantage of the latest Google Ads Performance Max features.

Google Ads Performance Max New Features

Forecast the impact of Performance Max using Performance Planner

With the Performance Planner tool, advertisers can now stimulate the results of Performance Max campaigns.

Performance Planner was previously accessible for Search, Shopping, Display, App, Video, and Local campaigns and now is also supported for Performance Max campaigns.

Google’s Performance Planner gives you the most accurate forecast possible by using billions of data points from actual searches.

You can forecast how your campaign may perform in the future and simulate what could happen when you adjust key variables like your campaign budget and ROAS or CPA targets.

Performance Planner’s forecasts are also adjusted for seasonal events so you can explore your potential holiday opportunities in the upcoming weeks.

The new Performance Planner provides advertisers with a detailed breakdown of the performance of their campaigns so advertisers can see how their campaigns are performing on a daily basis.

Use asset group scheduling to plan and organize your campaigns

Asset Group Scheduling is another amazing tool to use when planning a Holiday Campaign, launched earlier this month.

With asset group scheduling, you can now add automated rules to your Performance Max asset groups. These rules allow you to set ads to run at specific times of the day, giving you more control and flexibility over your campaigns.

You can also create and schedule various asset groups in advance, like if you want to prepare a set of holiday-themed assets ahead of time before a big sale.

This is especially helpful if you want to make sure your creative assets are approved in advance.

Additional headlines

You can now upload up to 15 headlines to your Performance Max asset group.

As more headlines are added, Google can test more combinations and find the ones that work best and find the most effective ones.

Here is what Google says-

“By adding more headlines, you can take advantage of machine learning’s ability to create and test even more combinations to find the best-performing variations.”

Explanations

Performance fluctuations can be frustrating and difficult to understand. However, with the right tools and information, you can quickly get to the root of the problem.

Explanations help you identify the factors driving performance fluctuations, diagnose issues, and view recommendations.

For instance, you may see explanations that provide analysis on your product status as well as your best-selling products, listing groups, and product types.

This data can help retailers evaluate which products had the most substantial sales spike during the holiday season.

These can be found in the explanation panels, and they’re available for all Performance max campaigns.

For all Performance Max campaigns, explanations are available, but there are some new explanations made specifically for online sales with a product feed.

First-party audience insights

As we move closer to cookie-less browsing, many marketers are wondering how they will be able to accurately target their audiences.

Data segments of your audience will be added to the audience insights on the Insights page in the coming weeks.

This enables you to gain a better understanding of the data you’re collecting firsthand and determine which of your customer lists convert the best.

You can use Audience Insights to:

• Learn more about the user groups that are viewing your ads and understand how Google Automation is helping you.
• Improve your creatives by determining which assets and messaging people are engaging with the most.
• You can gain a greater understanding of your target market and optimize your targeting, creatives, and overall campaign performance by applying what you’ve learned.

According to Google, 54% of shoppers used more than five channels to make purchases during the holiday period in 2021.

With Performance Max campaigns, businesses can take advantage of Google’s vast ad network and reach more potential customers.

Google Ads Performance Max Holiday Best Practices

New features for the upcoming holiday season include best practices for promoting holiday sales.

Google recommends the following best practices as you plan your holiday campaigns:

1. As the holidays approach, it’s time to adjust your Performance Max campaign budgets and ROAS or CPA targets. This will ensure that you are visible to consumers when they are doing their holiday shopping.
2. Consider using seasonality adjustments if you have a promotion, sale, or event where you expect to see drastic fluctuations in conversion rates or values over a short period of time.
3. To prioritize sales of specific products, create targeted campaigns with separate budgets.

However, if you are interested in highlighting new holiday creative assets, you can easily create a new asset group for these in your existing Performance Max -campaigns. Simply pause your evergreen asset groups, if needed.

This way, you can make sure that your new holiday assets get the attention they deserve!

To learn more about Google’s holiday announcement and recommendations, head to the Google Ads help center.

Timing is Important

As a marketer, you know that the key to success is to always be one step ahead of your competition.

But in today’s rapidly changing landscape, it’s becoming more and more difficult to anticipate what’s coming next.

This requires a delicate balance of planning ahead and being able to pivot quickly in response to changes in the market.

Fortunately, Performance Max helps you capture new conversion opportunities across channels in real time, so you can quickly adjust your marketing strategy on the fly.

By using AI to automate tasks and process data, Performance Max frees up marketers to focus on strategic planning and creativity.

With Performance Max, you’ll always be able to stay one step ahead of your competition and keep your business growing.

Final Thoughts

With these new features, you can reach shoppers across the Google ecosystem, and boost your sales with Google’s Performance Max campaigns.

So whether you’re just getting started or you’re a marketing pro, be sure to utilize these latest features as soon as possible, ahead of the holiday season. Happy selling!

FAQs