We’ve mentioned Performance Max campaigns a couple times before, and there’s a reason for that – the new campaign type is doing amazing in Google Ads and could help take your brand or business to the next level. While Performance Max can work for many campaign types – Local campaigns are especially good candidates for the benefits upgrading to Performance Max can provide.
Why Should I Upgrade My Local Campaigns?
Local campaigns are especially important for small businesses during the busy holiday season, but we’ve found them to be beneficial cornerstones of evergreen marketing initiatives. When a nearby potential customer searches for a gift item, you want your products and services to come up first to those close enough to drive to your store. Here’s how Performance Max (PMax) can help make that happen.
Easier Optimization
PMax does a lot of optimization work for you, meaning you get to spend less time trying to setup your campaign or run through data and campaign performance for clues on what to improve. While that is part of what we love about PPC, it’s not for everyone and it can help businesses be a bit quicker and nimbler when pivoting. That’s because Google’s machine learning is often a faster process than manual optimization, so that campaign type can allow you to keep up with the ever-evolving holiday market.
Improved Insights
While there will likely never be as much data as we’d like on what’s working or not working in our PMax campaigns, they data we get from Google has been improved since the campaign type first launched. While we can see asset performance, to analyze the success of different images, video and copy, there are also new insights available, such as rising search trends, though they are a bit harder to act on.
New Audiences
Google’s new features also opens you up to new audiences that you may not have segmented out in previous campaign types. PMax can identify new segments and even use a detection tool to determine if a user is a new customer. Doing this can allow you to set a campaign goal for new or existing customers since you may have separate cost per goals for each type.
How do I Upgrade?
If your campaigns are eligible for the self-upgrade tool, you can find it as a notification or on the Recommendations or Campaign pages in Google Ads. The tool will transfer your historical performance and ad settings over to the new PMax campaigns.
When creating a campaign, the Performance Max option will be available if you have “Sales,” “Leads,” or “Local store visits and promotions” selected.
Google lists five best practices to follow after upgrading:
- Use the Performance Planner. You can plan your budget and see how changes could affect campaign performance.
- Start early. Begin campaigns at least a couple weeks before a sale is meant to take place. Upgrade the creatives to be more specific as time goes on.
- Set values for conversion actions. Different clicks should be worth different amounts of money to your business.
- Use one CTA per asset group. Local campaigns supported multiple custom CTAs, but PMax campaigns should only use one. If you’re upgrading an existing campaign from Local to PMax, up to five CTAs will be transferred as read-only.
- Turn off ad scheduling and geo-targeting. Google states that while these settings are usable in PMax campaigns, they could get in the way of performance.
Want to get started with ad optimization right away? Reach out to us today.