The global digital advertising (paid ads) market was valued at $374.2 billion in 2020. With over 2 billion online shoppers worldwide, it will reach $763.6 billion by 2025. Are you planning to get your piece of the pie by taking advantage of online paid ads? With a huge network of up to two million websites that engage 90% of consumers, you surely won’t want to miss this opportunity to reach a larger audience. In 2021, Google Ads revenue accounted for 209.49 billion US dollars.
If you’ve used Google Ads before, you must know how difficult and time-consuming it is. Ordinarily, you would have to correctly execute the following activities.
- Identify and Set The Campaign Goal: As soon as you begin setting up, Google asks you to choose the goals for your ads which include more calls, website sales or signups, to get more store visits, and so on.
- Create the Target Audience according to Demographics: You’ll also have to specify which geographies you want your advertisements to run in. This is especially beneficial to local enterprises focusing their sales efforts within a particular geography.
- Add Keywords: Google will generate alternative themes based on the content of your page. As a starting point for your campaign, you can tailor the keywords you use in your ads depending on their suggestions.
- Insert the Ad Creatives: This is the most crucial part of your Google Ads set up. You’ll need to create the headlines and meta descriptions for your first ad in this section. You must also include the copy/text that will persuade potential buyers to click.
- Set your Budget: This is where you’ll set your daily budget. You have control over the bids for clicks because you can set them yourself.
- Setup Conversion Tracking: The final step is to set up all of the necessary conversion tracking fields for your company. Google offers a variety of alternatives, including web form leads, eCommerce orders, ad calls, and more. These enable you to track the performance of your ads.
Setting up Google ads to maximise profitability without a digital marketing expert can be extremely tedious and complex. So, in November 2021, Google announced the Performance Max Campaign to boost your search engine marketing efforts. Performance Max is an automated goal-based campaign that leverages machine learning to serve the relevant audience.
Here’s how Performance Max simplifies your Google Ads efforts.
How does Performance Max work?
Google has been preparing intelligent and automated tools for a long time, and the new Performance Max campaigns are no exception. It is, perhaps, the newest and most revolutionary add-on to Google Ads.
According to Google, performance max campaigns enable digital marketers to promote their products & services across Google’s network through a single, easy-to-manage campaign.
In other words, these are single campaign types that allow you to reach your customers across Google’s six different platforms:
- YouTube
- Display
- Search
- Discovery
- Gmail
- Maps
Currently, to run paid ads on these networks, you need to have different creatives and campaigns for the same. Performance max rolls all of them into one, so you can reach customers across all the different channels through an all-in-one Google Ads campaign.
The new Google Performance Max campaigns are primarily driven by goals that you choose while setting up your ad. You set your goals; then the automation will utilise those goals to create and run ads that are most relevant to those goals.
Suppose you are releasing a new product or service, and you want 500 visitors to visit your page. To accomplish this goal, you will have to set your goals (probably from sales and leads), insert campaign assets, optimise your campaign, and then machine learning will ensure proper execution of the campaign to meet your specified conversion goals.
How to use Performance Max to boost your ROI and ROAS
The benefits of using Performance Max campaigns are manyfold. Since it is all AI-enabled and automated, your Google Ads campaign is likely to grow by 10x. Artificial Intelligence can optimise your ads and target the right audience based on previous data.
Here are the major benefits of switching to performance max campaigns.
URL Expansion: Its machine learning capabilities allow the default URL to choose a landing page based on the customer’s intent, and drive the best result from your Google Ads campaign.
Advertisements Made Easy: Performance Max discontinued ad formats and switched to asset groups. This includes a few essential assets focused on one theme, but are different as regards creatives, call to actions, and graphics.
Assets, in an advertisement, are typed content (headings, sales copies) and creatives (images, video and HTML5 bundles) that can be uploaded along with the advertisement.
Conversion Signal: Google constantly upgrades its AI and automation capabilities to make its campaigns more intelligent. Performance max counts on one such feature and signals if it detects potential conversions from any specific segment.
In addition to these, performance max’s automation capabilities take over time-consuming tasks and allow you to focus on more strategic and high-impact planning.
What goes out with performance max coming in?
Traditionally, paid advertisements were heavily focused on finding the right keywords, putting them the right way, targeting the right audience, coming up with ad creatives, and creating a landing page.
However, with performance max, many of these will no longer be a necessity for search engine marketing. With performance max features, advertisers will no longer need to find and filter keywords. Instead, they can focus on more catchy and immersive ad creatives, copies, calls to action, headlines and content.
While performance max is coming up with many excellent features, it discontinues a few. And maybe for some good reasons.
Lack of business knowledge
For a long time, women have been denied the opportunities that were afforded to men. Due to archaic attitudes regarding the education of the girl child, nearly 70.3% of women were reportedly illiterate in India in 2017 – 2018. This has always been considered one of the greatest socio-economic issues faced by the country, and remains one of the biggest impediments to women’s success. Without a foundational education, several women lack the platform to grow further and gain business knowledge, and the effect of these figures are ultimately reflected in the small percentage of successful women entrepreneurs in the country.
Smart shopping
Smart shopping is an exciting feature of Google Ads. It is AI-enabled and automatically pulls data from your feed to create shopping ads specifically designed for your customers and goals.
Local campaigns
A kind of local listing, these campaigns are optimised cross-platform. These are perfect for local advertisers with offline-only goals, and help them drive more in-store visits and sales.
Performance Max to upgrade Google Ads by combining smart shopping and local campaigns
To help advertisers increase sales, Google brings smart shopping and local campaigns into Performance Max’s purview. Smart shopping and local campaigns will no longer exist as independent campaigns, and advertisers will have to switch to Performance Max. However, they will benefit from Google’s broad network and cross-platform advertising.
Who can use Performance Max campaigns?
Everyone who is interested or engaged in online marketing, especially paid advertisements can use Performance Max campaigns. However, these campaigns are mainly designed for cross-platform advertising. Performance max will provide centralised access to ad campaigns across all channels, including YouTube, Maps and even display.
Performance Max campaigns utilise a holistic approach to drive optimal results for your campaign. This is done within the provided ad assets and utilising Google’s AI-enabled bidding strategy.
Though Performance Max campaigns are currently limited to the types of goals, they can be used to drive sales, online leads, and users to your store.
How to set up and optimise Performance Max campaigns?
Unlike traditional Google Ads, getting started on Performance Max campaigns is easy. Since they are all automated goal-based campaigns, make sure you have a specific goal – driving sales or engagement, for instance.
Here are some easy tips to get started on a performance max campaign.
Requirements (Ad Assets)
- Final URL (which can dynamically change with “Final URL expansion”),
- Up to 15 images,
- Up to five logos,
- Up to five videos (optional),
- Up to five 30-character headlines,
- Up to five 90-character headlines,
- One 60-character short description,
- Up to four 90-character descriptions,
- A call to action,
- The business name
Facing difficulties in setting up an ad on your own? Turn to Brego Business for expert assistance. We can help you set up and run a campaign in minutes!
Ready to launch your Performance Max campaign?
To create your first Performance Max campaign, you will get two options:
- Sales/Leads
- You can choose from search, display, shopping and video campaigns for this goal.
- Local Store Visits and Promotions
- Want to boost sales at your physical store? You can go with video or display campaigns.
Choose the campaign’s settings and upload the graphics (video, text or images).
From here, all your ads will be automatically displayed across Search, Maps, Display, Gmail, Discover feeds, etc. The campaign serves across all six of Google’s platforms.
Pros and cons of Performance Max marketing?
Despite offering a range of benefits, Performance Max campaigns fail in a few areas. Let’s break down the pros and cons of Performance Max campaigns.
Pros of Performance Max campaigns
- Quick Set-Up: Getting started on Performance Max campaigns is so easy and quick. Just set your budget, location, targets, choose your preferred campaign type, and your ad is ready to go live across all six platforms.
- Result-driven: With AI-driven automation features, performance max campaigns are designed to automatically test creativity and serve the best ads on top platforms where they are most likely to get converted into sales.
- Ad Scheduling and Visibility: Performance Max campaigns offer location and ad schedule adjustments. With this, you can post your ads targeting the right location at the right time.
Cons of Performance Max campaigns
- Cap on Bid: Not only are insights limited, but the bids also have a cap as per Performance Max. If you have an open budget, it might be best for you to look for channel-specific marketing. A bid is the amount of money that you are willing to spend on your campaign. In the Performance Max campaign, you can only create 100 campaigns. Head to Google’s limited-bid strategy to know more.
- Cannibalising channel-focused campaigns: As mentioned above, performance max campaigns are slightly deficient when it comes to reporting and insights. These campaigns don’t allow you to cannibalise your other campaigns and leverage the most successful results. Cannibalization refers to a situation in a paid advertisement campaign, especially in marketing, when your assets, primarily keywords of two different campaigns, become competitors of each other.
- Limited audience and location targeting: If you have been using channel-based campaigns, you may find it hard to measure audience performance in a Performance Max campaign. With limited insights, studying your campaign’s performance becomes difficult.
How will it change the face of paid ads?
To those who have been using Google Ads for a long time, it is evident that ads are becoming more and more automated with every new release. And, Google’s Performance Max campaigns are more automated than ever.
Though there are concerns about its limited reporting capabilities, we have seen better and more efficient results for cross-channel campaigns than those of its peers and channel-specific campaigns. We think it is safe to say that Google is well on its way to embracing the new era of automation.
If you’d like to learn more about Performance Max campaigns, figure out which structure for paid ads suits you best, or take a deep dive into the world of online marketing, drop in your details on our website or direct message us here.