Get More Sales with Performance Max [Step by Step Performance Max Set Up Guide]

Welcome back to the next free video in my Google Ads tutorial series called Get Google Ready in 2023. And in today's video, we're going to be taking you through how to set up Google's shiny new toy, which are performance max campaigns. And I do need to stress that with this video, I'm just going to be taking you through the step by step process. And then later in this series, I'll be taking you through how to optimize these types of campaigns. But so that you can best understand all of these terms that I'll be talking about as we go through this process of setting up a performance max campaign, you do need to know three core terms and that's firstly, asset groups. Now, if you've done any other type of Google Ads campaigns, asset groups are pretty much like ad groups in that they're the place where you can group together similar products, or if you're running a service based performance max campaign, similar services. And then within each of those asset groups, you can add what's called an audience signal. Now, an audience signal is some recommendations that you give to Google around the type of keywords or different websites. They could be competitors websites or industry websites that are related to your products or your services. And then within that audience signal, you can also build in some different audiences. Now these are audiences from your own data, so whether that would be website visitors or previous converters. And then you can also add in some different affinity or interest based audiences. And you can also refine your demographic targeting so your age and your income. But I do need to stress with these audience signals that they are very much light recommendations. Google does go beyond these selections and you can't block Google from doing that within the performance max campaign. And then finally, when we're talking about ad assets, this is essentially all of your ad copies, so your headlines, your long headlines and your descriptions along with your images and your videos. And this is the information that you give Google so that it will go through and create your ad, which are what people are going to be seeing and can click through to get through your website and book your service or buy a product. So now that you have an understanding of what the different things we're going to be talking about in regards to setting up a performance max campaign, I'm going to be taking you through that process of how you set up your asset groups, how you also add in your audience signals and then also create your ads. And just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads Master. And if you want to stay up to date and get notified every single time that I release a new video within this 10 part teaching series, get Google ready in 2023. Make sure that you've not only subscribed, but you've also turned on the notification bell so that you know every time I release a new free Google Ads tutorial on YouTube. But right now it's time for us to jump into a screen share so that I can take you through that step by step process showing you how to set up your very own Performance Max campaign the right way in 2023. And I will be going through this quite quickly, but never fear and don't worry if you miss any of these steps because if you follow the link in the description below, after you watch this video, you can download my free Performance Max campaign setup guide. And this includes screen shares and also all of the instructions you need so that you can set up your Performance Max campaign. But right now let's get into that screen share. So to set up your Performance Max campaign, when you're in Google Ads, you want to go and click new campaign. Then we click new campaign again. And the first step is that you need to choose whether you want to be focusing on sales or leads. Now I do want to break this down is that some people will say this isn't important, but this is a really important choice. And the reason for that is because if you were to go down and just select create a campaign without a goals guidance is that by selecting either sales or leads, it gives Google an initial signal on what you're wanting this campaign to do. So are you wanting it to create more leads for your business or are you wanting it to drive more sales? Now I'm going to be selecting this leads option, but as we go through this campaign setup, I'll also show you the points of how to set up a product based Performance Max campaign. So whether you're setting up this Performance max campaign for a service based business or a sales or e commerce based business, never fear because I'll be showing you exactly how to do it regardless of which option you want. But for this one we're going to initially select leads and then when you come from leads is that this is another important decision. You need to choose which conversion goals you want to be included. Now for this campaign it's going to be for a resort and the conversion actions that we accept we do actually have purchases so they can go through through and complete the Whole purchase and then also leads and contact forms. So I'm happy with all of these. But let's just say that you wanted to get rid of one of these. Say for example, the submit the lead forms, you would just remove that from the submit lead forms goal. Now I do need to stress this doesn't remove the conversion action from the whole campaign. It just means that Performance Max won't be using that conversion to target traffic. That's more likely to end up in that conversion action and it won't be used in your bid strategy. So if you're happy with that, we press continue and then from there we want to be choosing Performance. Now this is something that it is different and I will go through and show you what will happen in here. If you're doing this for a E Commerce or a product based campaign and if you go through and you're wanting to set up a Performance Max campaign for E Commerce, you would select sales. And if you just wanted to focus on purchases and not phone call leads, you would delete that goal then press continue. Once again selecting Performance Max. And this is the difference in here in that you would have to choose your merchant center so that you can show those individual products. But as you can see for a service based, because we're not using using that Google feed, it just goes straight to the campaign name. Now when it comes to the campaign name, there's no hard rule on what you need to call your campaign name. But I'm really big on having a really strong and clear naming convention. The reason for that is because it just makes it easier so that you don't come back into your account. You've got performance max 2 and performance max 3. You want to know exactly what this is about. And for this one, this is going to be for a villa resort. So we're going to be riding in Villa and we're going to be targeting Australia and Asia. So I've just written Australia and Asia and the reason for that is because if we want to set up some other performance campaigns down the track targeting different continents like Europe or America, I know exactly what they are. But as I said, it doesn't really matter what you call this, but the main thing is, is that you have a really strong naming convention. Four different E commerce campaigns. When I do this, if I set up a Performance Max campaign for something like T shirts, I'll write sales T shirts and then if I'm doing another one for pants, I'll do sales pants. Once we've got that name, you press Continue. And now these next steps are going to be the same whether you're doing a service based or an E Commerce based performance max campaign. So I'm just going to show through this screen in here. Now, when we go through to set up our budget, I do want to stress that you set it as a daily budget, but it runs on a monthly average. So if you wanted to spend $450 a month, you would set your daily budget at $15. If you wanted to spend $600 a month, you would set your budget at 20. But for this one we're just going to set it at $10 a day. And then you have the option to target it either on conversions or conversion value because with this one we're looking to drive inquiries. We would set it on conversions, but if you were an E Commerce store, you would set this on convers. At the start I would not recommend setting up a Target CPA or a Target roas. And the reason for that is because I like to get some initial data first before we look at setting up a bidding goal. And then it comes down to here. With your customer acquisition, you have two options. You can either optimize your campaign for acquiring new customers or you can just keep it by default where your campaign bids equally for new and existing customers. Now the way that this works is if you did want to focus it on acquiring new customers is that you would go through and you would edit this value. And what you're doing in here is that let's just say you've got some existing customer lists you would go through and add in these audiences. So all our visitors and our website visitors. And then from there we would go through and add in an extra value. Google's recommending $60, but if we wanted to put it at say $30, what it would do is it's saying that our current existing customer value is $91. It would increase it by that $30. So our new customer value is 121. So the way that this works is it, it's letting Google know when it comes to the bidding for those target CPA or those target ROAS scores is that it's assigning an extra value on for these new customers. But what we're going to be doing is we're just going to be keeping this by default. And then we go through and click next and then from there we want to choose the countries that we want to target. Obviously we said Australia and if we wanted to, we can also go through and add it by their location and you can do this by country, city, region or postcode. And all you need to do is just type in the country that you wanted to target and select target. But we'll just keep it for Australia for this one. And then it comes down to your language. Now I recommend only running a campaign in one language. And the reason for that is because you just want to make sure that the users search terms are matching the ad copy that you have. So if you're running a business where you're running multiple language campaigns, you would set up a separate campaign. Let's just say you wanted to run another campaign in Indonesian for example. That would happen in a separate campaign. Then you go down to more settings. The only thing that I'd be wanting to sort of touch on in here is this final URL expansion. And there's two options here is that you can select it to off. And what this means is that it's only going to be going through to the URLs that you provide. So that would mean the URLs that are in the ad copy or if you're doing an E commerce campaign, it would mean the URLs for the products that you're targeting. So let's just say you're targeting all of your T shirts. It would also target any URL that is related to your T shirts or if you kept it here to send it to the most relevant URLs on your site. What you could do is with this one is that you could keep it on, but then you could go through and say that we don't want it to go to say for example our contact page. So if it includes contact or if you don't want it to go to any of your blog pages, you could put blog in there and then it would stop going to those pages. Now for this one we're just going to keep this on. The only other thing that I do want to point out with this is that if you have this final URL expansion on Google now will actually edit your ad copy. So if you are in an industry where you need control over your ad copy, you do need to go through and select this off section. Even the ad copy which we're going to be putting in Google will make some differences to it. If it feels like it's going to be getting a high conversion level, then we go through and click on next. And now comes the time where we start to create our asset group. Now for performance max campaigns, I strongly recommend that you only set up your asset groups based around different types of products. For this one that we're targeting, we have one bedroom villas and two bedroom villas. So we're going to be setting up an asset group for a one bedroom villa and then we'll come back and set up a secondary asset group for a two bedroom villa. And because we are going to make that differential, I'm just going to go back and we are going to just set it and change it so that we're only providing it to the URLs only. So we're going to just be setting this one up firstly for the one bedroom villa and then I'll come back and set up one for a two bedroom villa. Once again, with this naming convention of the asset group name, it really comes down to how you want to create your naming convention. So when I'm running e commerce campaigns for performance Max, if I've got a shirts campaign, I would then create different asset groups around T shirts or polo shirts or long sleeve shirts. Now this is the initial URL that we want to be targeting which is our one bedroom villa, Seminyak. And then from here we can go through and add our different images. Now with our images I've already got some different assets and images that we've used from previous campaigns. The other option of what you can do is you can put your, it'll automatically grab any images from your URLs. You can put this in here or if you wanted to, you can actually upload from your computer some individual images. But we're just going to go through and select some of these from here. So we'll select this one and we've now got all of our 20 images. So we click save and then from there we can select our logos. I'm going to select both of our logos in the square format and also landscape. We click save and then from there we can go through and add some videos. Now there's two options with the videos. You can either add a YouTube video. Now if you don't go through and add a YouTube video, Google will automatically create this and they've even set up a new function where you can go into your asset library. So we go to Tools and Settings under shared Library, Asset library. Then when you're in your asset library you press plus go to video and you can and this is where you can just go through select one of these templates and this way you just get to control a little bit more of the images and also the text which is happening on your ad. Now the best option is to create a specific YouTube video, which we're in the process of creating for this business. So I'll just leave this blank at the moment. But they're the options that you've got for your videos and then it comes down to adding your headlines, your long headlines and your descriptions. Now I just want to break this down. When it comes to your headlines, these will be used for your search campaigns, same as your descriptions. But when it comes to your long headlines, these are the headlines that are also used for your YouTube and display. And it'll also be using your descriptions as well. Now what I've already got is that I've already got some different headlines that I'm going to be using and I've got them in a different Google sheet. So I just then start coming over and just start adding them in through here if you want as well. If you just click on the different headline, you can actually see that Google will actually put in some different recommendations for you. And then we do the same for our headlines. Now I do strongly recommend that you use all of these options. So Google is saying you can add up to five headlines and also five long headlines and four descriptions. The reason why I recommend that you use as many as possible is because it allows you to get more information about your split testing. And just make a note that for this first short description, it does need to be no more than 60 characters, whereas the other ones are 90. If you ever do go beyond the character limit, you can see here we've got 89 out of 60. You get this red marker in here, so let's just remove that one. And what Google will also do is that if you do have any spelling mistakes like in here, it does let you know. And then from there you just need to go through and write in your business name and also with your site links, because we've already got some different account level site links. We don't need to add these in. But if you wanted to and if you don't know, site links are little links which appear below your ad here, like in this one in here. Because we've already got these added, we don't need to do anything extra. When it comes to your call to action, you can either keep this automated or add something that you want to. Now for any commerce campaign, I'll generally change this to Shop now. Or because we're wanting people to book, you could add this as Book now and what that will do in display campaigns, as you can see here now, it's forced it to say Book now. And the same thing happens on YouTube. It's forcing it to say book now, but we'll just keep that automated. And if you want to, this is where you can also go through and add in any extra promotions, price links or structured snippets. We've got all these added in there so we're happy to keep that as is. And now comes the time where you you go through and you add in your audience signal. And as I said at the start remembering this audience signal is where you're going to be giving some Google some slight recommendations on what to target. Now this is the one bedroom villa. So I'll just type the audience name as one bedroom villa. Then when it comes into our custom segments this is where we go through and we added some different keywords or websites that we want to help with the targeting. So we write a new segment. We're going one bedroom and I know for this one we're looking at targeting keywords in and around one bedroom seminar villas. If you type this in, Google actually gives you some initial recommendations which you can scroll through and see if you want any of those. I'm just happy with that. Now as I said, Google will go beyond these selections so that's why I'm not adding in any of these ones. Although I will add this one bedroom villa with a private pool and then we just go through and click save and then from there we can go through and add our data. So we can just go through and add all of these. Now the reason why I do like adding in this data is because it gives Google an idea of people who have interacted with our ads before. So it definitely does help with that init. And then we can also go through and add in some extra affinity based targeted markets. So this is in the travel. So we'll go travel vacation rentals also as well because this is Bali, we'll type in some Bali keywords and I'll also include Indonesia. Now if we wanted to rule out any demographics now for this campaign because this is a bit more of an expensive product and we just know that the majority of people who stay in our resorts are over 25, we've limited that out. The same as well is that we do know that our general average age is very much that at 25 to 45. So I have extended it a little bit further, but we'll just keep it to that. Then we click save and then our audience signal is added. But what I do want to stress in here is that you can see from here your audience signal has been added. But Performance Max will go beyond your selections to find new conversions based on your goals. The other thing that I did want to show you now, if you're setting up a Performance Max campaign for an E Commerce account, the only difference in these two processes will be as you can see for the service based campaign, it's gone straight from your asset group name to your assets. But if you're setting this up for E Commerce, you see under your asset group name it goes into this listing groups and then it goes into your assets and your audience signal. Now what this listing group is is that this allows you to actually go through and refine your products. So if we want to use a selection of our products, so we don't want all of our products, we can go through and add some selections. So we can do this by the brand, we could do this by the category, or if we wanted to, we could go do this by the item id. Now for this one they do nightlights and they also do do some money boxes for kids. So we've just typed in the light. So we're getting all the lights in into one asset group and then we've selected those and then you go through and click save. So that's the only difference between setting up the asset group for a service based campaign or an E Commerce based campaign is that when you're doing a service based campaign, it goes straight from asset group into your assets. When you're going through and doing it for a E Commerce campaign you go for asset group and then you can go through and edit your listing groups. If you want to have a selection of products and not just target all of your products, then once we're happy with that we go through and click next. And then what happens from there is that Google is currently checking for your errors and just goes through and just make sure that your campaign has got everything it needs to be able to run. And then once that's set up, we just go through and click Publish campaign and then congratulations, your campaign is ready to go. Now the one thing I do want to note is that it can take one to two days before your campaign goes live. So don't be worried that if you've set up your campaign today and you don't start seeing anything for 48 hours and if you wanted to what you can do, Remember how I said if you wanted to set up a second asset group. So we've got our first asset group for the one bedroom villas, we just need to go into asset groups. Then we click plus and we can add in a new asset group and for this one we're going to do two bedroom villa and we just go through that same process again and then once we've gone through and added in all of our images and our ad copies, if you're doing E commerce, you could select a different group of products. Once you've done that you' go through and click Save. And then once that was completed you would see a secondary asset group in here and you could have three, four, five or how many different sets of products or services you wanted to add into your Performance Max campaign. And congratulations, you finished that step by step process in setting up your very own Performance Max campaign and remembering we broke it down and I showed you exactly how to complete it. Regardless of whether you're setting up a service based Performance Max campaign or a product based ecommerce Performance Max campaign. And remember, if you missed any of those steps, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below and you can download my Performance Max Campaign guide so that you can see all of the screenshots of that step by step process. Thank you for joining me. And remember, if you want to get notified every single time I release a new video, especially this Get Google ready for 2023 teaching series, make sure you turn on that notification button and I look forward to seeing you in my next video very very soon. See y.