Google’s Latest Updates to Performance Max Campaigns

Google’s replacement for Smart Shopping gives marketers and businesses new tools to better run their ad campaigns online.

Performance Max is replacing Google Smart Shopping — the upgrade first became available in April 2022, and will automatically upgrade any campaigns not upgraded by the time it’s fully rolled out. It gives advertisers tools to access the entire Google Ads inventory from a single campaign, including YouTube, Search, and Discovery, which were not included in Smart Shopping.

Performance Max offers an expanded slate of options for advertisers to take advantage of. Source: Google Ads Tutorials: Audience signals in Performance Max campaigns

This new campaign type includes all of the features of the previous version and builds out the inventory and data insights available. While this new service left beta at the end of 2021, Google continues to roll out updates and upgrades to better serve advertisers looking to maximize the reach and impact of their campaigns.

Local Store Support

Performance Max now includes a local add-on that helps optimize your campaign to boost in-store and local shopping actions, including sales, visits, and more by targeting users based on their physical location. This uses location data and surfaces ads to users that match their frequently visited locations and other targeting data.

Optimization Score

Google rolled out a new score that ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating full functionality, that shows you how well your account is configured. This includes tips to help you improve your score that also suggest how much your score will improve by following it.

Time-Specific Campaigns

These seasonality updates allow marketers to modify their bidding strategy to adjust to anticipated increases or decreases in conversion rates — holiday sales, expected store closures, etc. This feature allows you to specify a time block to adjust bidding automatically and return to standard rates once that block is over.

Data Exclusions

This feature allows users to update their Smart Bidding with date ranges to ignore. Whether you need to omit data because of conversion tracking issues, missed tags, website outages, or any other reason, you can refine your information so your campaign runs as intended.

For more information on how Performance Max campaigns can improve your traffic quality with brand new customer insights, Digital Media Manager Stan Petrov wrote a comprehensive breakdown on how to get the most out of this new service. He digs into the added benefits of this new service, including its wide reach, improved responsiveness, and brand awareness boosts. The information available through Performance Max can help push prepared and data-savvy businesses to new heights, and Petrov examines how you can better understand how to run your campaigns to get the most out of them.

Running a successful online ad campaign is only one part of a data-centric, omnichannel strategy, giving you the power to know more and do more. Reach out today to talk about how to achieve more for your marketing — and your business.

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.amsive.com/2022/12/02/googles-latest-updates-to-performance-max-campaigns/