How to Optimise Performance Max Campaigns

Is your Performance Max campaign about as reliable as a politician's pre-election promises? In that it promises you one thing, but then it completely delivers the absolute opposite while still trying to tell you that it is doing the best thing for you and your business. Now, if that's you, I don't want you to worry because in this video I'm going to be taking you through the 4 core optimization steps that you can take to improve the performance of your Performance Max campaigns because Ultimately, when it comes to spending money inside of Google Ads, the only reason that you are spending that money is because you want to see more real customers and real sales come into your business. Now, just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy, and I started Define Digital Academy for one purpose and one purpose only, and that's to help you business and brand owners to be able to generate more sales and leads for your businesses.. And if you are getting stuck with Google Ads and you do feel like you need an extra hand, if you go and check out the description in this video below, you can not only fill out a How Can We Help You form, which allows us to really know how we can best serve you and your business to help you get better results. And plus, there's a whole heap of other free resources, including my Google Ads optimization checklist, which takes you through all the different optimizations and actions that you can complete in your Google Ads campaigns. And and you can also see a free Google Ads Claw tool that we use inside of Define Digital Academy to really help us supercharge our data analysis so we can get better results for our Google Ads campaigns. And you can get all of that, just follow that link in the description below. But right now, let's get back into the core optimization actions that you can complete for your Performance Max campaigns. Now, as I take you through these 4 core optimization actions, you first need to understand what I call the Performance Max optimization hierarchy. And what I do will need you to understand is that Performance Max is very different to any other Google Ads campaign that you're going to be dealing with for your business. And the reason for that is that by default Performance Max is set to either maximize conversions or maximize conversion value. It's because it's unique that you can't use maximize clicks or max CPC or target impression shares. It is purely built to generate more conversions. Now that is a very good thing, But there is also some dangers and some pitfalls if you don't understand this, because within Performance Max is that yes, it is built to generate more conversions, but as a payoff, you do have less controls that you can do to increase that performance. So it's really, really important you do understand this. And what I want to take you through now is this Performance Max optimization hierarchy. And what I really, really want to stress and make you understand with Performance Max, that the most critical or the most crucial part that you can do to improve the performance of Performance Max campaigns is to really make sure that you have the correct conversion data going into your Performance Max campaign. And this is what we say, that you need to define what a successful outcome looks like for your business. And this is where a lot of businesses can get caught up, because if you don't have the right settings inside of your Performance Max campaigns and you're saying, say for example, you want an add to cart to be counted as conversion action You're telling Performance Max is that that's what you want. So you need to be really, really careful whether you're on lead gen or whether you're in e-commerce that you are setting the conversion actions that you want Google to find more of. They need to be an action which is something that is really valuable to your business. For e-commerce brands, this is obviously transactions and sales, but for lead generation, you do need to be really, really careful because you need to make sure that it's not just form fills Or if the form that you are setting, it does— like, say for example, it's a multi-step form. Now, I don't want to get too sidetracked on this because at the end of this video I will share, share some extra teaching where you can learn more about that. But I do really, really want to highlight you need to make sure you've got the right conversion data feeding into your Google Ads account. Because what you're going to see as we talk through this video is that yes, you can go do, do things like update your creative assets, update your ad copy. You can put in some different things around audiences and search and around keywords. But with Performance Max, it's really, really important to note that Google makes this very, very clear, that they are very much suggestions. They are not hard guidelines. And that's why your conversion data becomes the most important thing. Because remembering, when you start with Performance Max, you're locked into maximize conversions or you're locked into maximize conversion value. And then you can also add in things like target CPA or target ROAS further down the track. And that's why for me, we start Performance Max as what we call a secondary campaign. So we would generally not introduce Performance Max until we are seeing at least 30 conversions over a 30-day period. And then what you need to do from there is that when you start with a Performance Max campaign— because a lot of businesses do ask what should your starting budget be— is it needs to be a generate at least one conversion a day. So when you're looking at targeting Performance Max is that you want to find out what that cost per conversion is. And so let's just say your cost per conversion is $10. You need to then have a starting budget of $10 a day. If your cost per conversion is $50, you need to have a starting budget of $50 a day. If it's $100, that needs to be $100 a day. So that's why we would generally look to start with Search or Shopping and then introduce Performance Max. All right, so with all that established, let's now jump into a screen share because I really want to walk you through the important settings and optimizations that you need for success with your Performance Max campaigns. Let's go. All right, so when it comes to optimizing your Performance Max campaigns, the first thing you do need to get right is actually the campaign settings inside of your Performance Max campaign. So what I'm going to take you through is some important settings that you need to make sure that you've got right, and these are your brand exclusions, your page feeds if you want to use them, your demographic exclusions, and then finally your data exclusions. So let me now jump in and show you where you can check these and how to go through and make sure that they're set correctly. So we've got a Performance Max campaign here, and I'm just going to take you through to the settings. If you didn't see how I did that, if you go to your— if you go to your Performance Max campaign in here, you'll see a little gear icon over to the right and just go through and click on that. There are other ways, but I find that's the easiest way to get there. And the first thing you want to go through and check is you want to talk— check about your brand exclusions. Now let me explain why you should be setting brand exclusions. Now remember what I said before with Performance Max, it's very much built around generating more conversions. The easiest or the cheapest traffic which is going to convert is your branded traffic. Now as a general rule, we like to exclude branded traffic from any campaign. And if we've got branded campaigns, we like to have them in a separate search campaign. And the reason for that is so that we can target specific branded search terms, which, which then allows us to, you know, use different budget controls and also use different target bidding controls if we need to. So the way that we do this inside of your Performance Max campaign, if you go down to brand exclusions, you can see we've got a brand exclusion added in there. If you haven't done this yet, you just need to go and add a new brand list. Write the list name, and then from there you can go through and add some URLs to add as a brand list or a brand exclusion. Now it's important to note that sometimes that does take a couple of days to fully set up. If you wanted to stop your Performance Max campaign spending on competitor campaigns or competitive brand names, what you could also do is add a brand— you could add two brand lists. So one could be your own brand and second could be your competitor brand. So that's the brand exclusions that you need to add. Secondly, when it comes to page feeds, now this is a newer option which you do have, and what this does do is it allows you to limit what Google is going to use for its targeting. And this becomes really important if you run multiple product categories or multiple services. So let's just say, for example, in e-commerce brand, you may only want to be targeting your summer outfits or your, your summer wear. You don't want to target winter clothing inside of Performance Max. You could then add a page feed, and the way that you go through and do this is that when you're in page feeds, you do need to set these up first. You can just click through here and it is going to show you how to go through and do this. The easiest way I go— I find to do this, if you just use this search function and if you go into here. All right, so when it comes to page feeds, what you do need to do is if you do want to add these, you need to get it out of settings. The easiest way I find to go through and do this is if you just go into here, the search feature at the front, and and just type in page feeds. You can get this in through going to Tools or Data Feeds. I just find using the search function really, really easy. But if you did want to see where to do that, you'd go to Tools, go to Business Data, and then that's going to bring you into this Data Feeds section. You then go through and click on this plus and add in a page feed. And what you can do from there is that you can go through and you need to add in your website, and that'll start building out that page feed for you. Now what you want to be doing in through here is you just want to be selecting the products or services that you want Performance Max to target. So say for example, before, in this way you would select all of your summer, summer clothing if you only wanted to go down summer clothing, or if you were a service-based business and you only wanted to focus on one or two services, you would choose those services. And then what that will allow you to do from here is that they will then show up in this page feed section, and then you can go through and add them in through there. Alright, the next part you need to go through is to your demographic exclusions. Now in this campaign, we haven't added it because it hasn't been a problem for us yet. Let's just say, for example, you knew that in your, your business you had a lot of search traffic for, say, for example, 18 to 25 age bracket, but you know they just didn't convert. What you could do is you could turn on age exclusions, and then what you could do from here is you need to select the ranges that you want to exclude. And you could add them in there. Now, you may not want to do this at the start, but I would— unless you do have a lot of clear data inside of your business where you know these are the only demographics or age brackets that, that convert for your business. Then we go into our locations. Now, one thing you do need to check with your location setting is that when you go to your location options, you do just want to make sure that's set to presence, uh, not presence or interest only. And the reason for that is because you just want to be targeting people that are actually in or regular in the, the locations that you're targeting. And then finally, if you did want to, what you could also do is your data exclusions. Now the reason why I like using these data exclusions is what we can do is that we can go through and actually exclude people who have converted before. Now the reason why I like this is because with Performance Max, we like to use it for new customers So what you're doing by here is going in and adding in purchases. We're saying to Performance Max, these people have already converted, please don't target them anymore. So in terms of optimizing your Performance Max campaign, that's some things you can do from a settings or a campaign settings point of view in order to get right and see better results for you and your business. All right, but before we move to the next step, the one thing that I do just want to mention as well, if your Performance Max campaign is already targeting a lot of branded traffic and you've got target CPA or goals set there, that if you do add in that brand exclusion, you to also remove that target CPA or target ROAS to let the campaign reset to the new rule that you're giving it, especially if your Performance Max campaign is already converting a lot of branded traffic. Let's now move on to the second big optimization, the action that you can make inside of your Performance Max campaign, and this has got to do with your smart bidding strategy. Now remember what I said at the start, that when it comes to Performance Max, you're locked into maximize conversions or maximize conversion value, and then what you can do from there is you can add in a target CPA or target ROAS. Now it's important to note that this acts as an important guardrail where you're essentially saying to Google, if say for example you add in a target CPA of $50, you're saying you can spend my daily budget as long as you're getting me conversions at $50 per conversion. Or if you've got a target ROAS of 500%, you're saying to Google, you can spend my budget as much as you like, but I need to get a 500% return on my spend. Now don't take that as an easy win and go, oh great, I just need to set that and then Google just goes and does the work for me. Because what can happen if you set that target CPA too low— so let's just say for example you're setting it at $20 and your account is currently getting a cost per conversion of $50 or $60— what's going to happen is that there's just not enough traffic. You don't have enough data there for Google to be able to find those conversions at that rate. Or on the, on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're using target ROAS, if you set your target too high— so let's just say you set a target ROAS at $600 and you, you're only getting an account history of a target ROAS at $250 or $300— Google is not going to be able to find enough traffic at that level in order to give you the results. Yes, you will get some conversions, but it's quite often that you just won't get enough data. And remember what I said at the start, that once you start hitting below that 30 conversions per month threshold, you generally find that you see diminishing returns with Performance Max because there's just not enough data for it to be able to find what it needs to find. And then you just get put on the back burner and Google kind of forgets about you. So while it's good news, you do need to set it correctly and you do need to set it properly. So let's jump in and let me give you some examples here. The first thing I want to show you is that we're looking at a longer-term example. So this is from July through to May this year. This is for an e-commerce brand. They always need to be having a target ROAS of above 400, which we're finally to get back above again. Now it's in their, their lower season. They, uh, like a lot of e-commerce brands, they have a big peak in the back end of the year, and then it does start to slow down that earlier part of the year. I do need to stress as well, this is only one of their Performance Max campaigns. They've got about another 3 or 4 campaigns running. So you do need to think about that as we get more advanced into how these campaigns relating to each other. You might— some businesses have some strategies where they purposely run different campaigns at different bidding strategies. But for the purpose of this video, I just want to show you how your target ROAS, and I'll also show you how your target CPA interacts with the other metrics inside of your Google Ads campaign. So with Performance Max, the good thing I do like is Google's got this feature which is called your average target ROAS, or if you're using, um, target CPA, your average target CPA. And what you can do then is you can actually see the different results inside of your campaign. Now what I want you to show in through here is the effect of our target ROAS and the traffic coming into the campaign. So you can see from here when this business first started, uh, coming in, you could see what they were having an issue where they just weren't generating enough traffic. So what we did is we worked with them to lower their target ROAS And as you can see from here, as we actually lowered their target ROAS, they actually saw an increase in their conversion value. Now, for many businesses, that works counterculturally. Like, you know, how does that happen? And it purely comes down to the amount of data that was coming in. They just weren't getting enough clicks and they weren't getting enough conversions in there. So what we were able to do is by lowering that target CPA goal, it actually allowed more spend into the account, which increased the conversions, and then it also upped that target ROAS. Now what has happened as we have started to move further and further along, we have removed that target ROAS because we're kind of doing a reset in that account as we build up to their next peak season, which is coming in post, uh, September this year. Is that what we have done here again, we've removed the target ROAS, so just gone back to maximize conversion value And I want you to see what's happened from here is that this conversion value has started to go up again. And let me just pull in the click data. Is it— as the clicks have gone up, the conversion value has gone up as well. So there are a lot of different metrics there you need to be looking at, your conversion rates and all of those things. And there are obviously other optimization actions that you can complete, but it is important to note that I just want you to see that correlation and that relationship. If your target ROAS is too high, you're gonna see less data coming into your campaign. But the main thing that I wanted you to see there is just that correlation that if your target ROAS goal is too high, what you can do, you can what I call stifle or strangle the account where there's just not enough conversions, not enough clicks coming to the account. So it is important to make sure you get that balance right. Now what we're looking at here is we're looking at a lead generation business and they're using maximize conversions. Now with this one, we haven't yet added in a target CPA. So the other thing I do want to stress is that don't feel like you've got to add in a target CPA. Now the reason we haven't done that yet is because they're there with this business, and this is what one thing I would say when you are optimizing Google Ads campaigns, doesn't matter what type of campaign it is, the what's happening outside of Google Ads, so in the real business, is something that's really important. They've had some other factors they're going through, staff turnovers, and so they've had to pull back and increase the budgets. That's why for a little bit, we haven't gone and locked in a target CPA. But the other reason is, is because there's still a little bit of what I call volatility in their results. So we had a good period here where we were looking at adding in a target CPA, but then you can see from here, just, it shot back up and now it's gone back down. They actually had some conversion data tracking issues, which we were able to get on top of and fix really quickly. But you can see post there as well, it's just sort of jumping around a little bit, but Generally, that's what you want to be seeing, a good 3 to 4 weeks of adding in a target CPA where we see that, that cost, cost per conversion variance not increase any more than 20%. What I mean by that is that, you know, you can see from here we had 170, 140, 166, 135, 195. It was all between, you know, it was all pretty close together. So what we could do is add in a target CPA probably around about 200 for this business, and that where it would have been where it's at. We're coming back and fixing with them and working in some different things with them. So we'll come back and circle back to that again. But what I did want to just stress with this screen is don't feel like you have to add in a target CPA really, really early. We generally want to see a good 4 to 6 weeks of stability in our cost per conversions before we introduce that target CPA or that target ROAS. All right, now let's go into the third thing that you can do for optimizing your Google Ads campaigns, especially your Performance Max campaigns. And this is about reviewing your channel performance and your search terms. So we've spoken about the important campaign settings you need, we spoke, spoke about your bidding strategies. Now let's talk about your search terms and where your campaign is actually spending the money. All right, to do this, you're going to be going into your Insights and Reports. And in Insights and Reports, just make sure you're only looking at your Performance Max campaign only. Otherwise you won't see this channel performance option. Now what the channel performance option does is that this gives us a report of where Google is spending its money. As you may know, with the Performance Max campaign is that what it does is it takes your budget and it spends it across all the different networks. So not only Search and Shopping, also goes into YouTube, Display, and it also goes into Discovery and Gmail and also local maps if you've got your business profile connected. What we have seen running Performance Max month after month, year after year, is that our best performing Performance Max campaigns always have the vast majority of the budget— think 95%— of that budget spent across the Search and the Shopping networks. If we ever see a Performance Max campaign which is spending more than 5% across Display, Discovery, YouTube, all of those things, we generally go, that's a poor performing, um, Performance Max campaign. And the reason for that is because there's other levers that you've got in order to market on those channels. Demand gen, YouTube campaigns where you've got better controls and you can do your creative testing, because you can't really do that inside of a Performance Max campaign. So where we do is we go into our channel, we go into, as I said, insights and reports and into channel performance. The other reason for why as well is because remembering Performance Max is very much what we want to see as a conversion, a conversion driving engine. We don't want it to have a super, super long acquisition window. We're wanting to target people who are already ready to convert. And you can see from here, I— some people like this one, I just scroll down to the bottom, to the channel distribution. You can see from here that we have, of a $2,988— let's call it $3,000— you know, $2,914 is being spent on search. So there is a little bit of YouTube in there. We don't mind YouTube, a little bit of that being spent, because as you can see the vast majority, well over 95%, is being spent on search. So that's the first thing they want to look at. If you're running an e-commerce store, you do see that it's not picking up with your search and your shopping. What that does generally does lead to is you, you don't have enough data in your product titles and your attributes. So you really do need to go back and do optimizations there. But let's stick within the Google Ads dashboard right now because the next thing you want to be looking at is your search terms. Now this is a newer option that Google has given for Performance Max campaigns. Uh, and what you can do here is you can actually go through and add in— so you could select some different keywords and you can add them as a negative keyword. Let me make a big warning here. I've got a saying when it comes to Performance Max and the new optimizations that Google offered: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And what I mean by that is that some people were really, really excited when it came to adding in negative keywords, and they just went crazy with all the negative keywords that you added inside of Performance Max. Remember what I said at the start, Performance Max is driven off conversion. So if you are finding a lot of irrelevant traffic in there, it means that you don't have enough conversion data, to put it bluntly. What we use negative keywords in for Performance Max is if Google is starting to go through and target some, some competitors, so we add them as negative keywords, or products or services that we definitely do not offer. Let me give you an example. If you're an e-commerce brand and you are selling clothes but you don't have any kids clothing options, if you start seeing searches around kids, you add kids clothing or those variants as an exclusion. If you're a lead generation business, and let's just say for example you only do maintenance and you don't do installations, you start seeing a whole lot of keywords or search terms about installations, you would add that theme as a negative keyword. So it's more about blocking out themes as opposed to going through and blocking out individual keywords. So yes, it is an important thing that you can do inside a Performance Max campaign, but don't overuse it, remembering that your conversion data is still the best way to make sure that you're getting best, uh, better options with your Performance Max campaigns. All right, and then let's go to the fourth core thing that you can do, which is reviewing your ad copy and your landing pages. The way that you go through and do this is that you want to go through into your asset groups So let's firstly work through your ad copy. Now, once again, this is an important step, but just remembering it's still your conversion actions and your conversion data which is getting through. But, but let me let you know where you can go through and have a look at this. Is it when you are in your asset groups? So now the way that you can go through and see the performance of your ad copy headlines and assets inside of Performance Max is that where you need to go into is that if you, when you selected on your Performance Max, ads campaign, go into assets, and then click on assets, and then you can see performance, uh, this tab across here. Now what I generally like to do is I like to add this filter in here, which is asset type, and then you can just go through and have a look at it one by one. And it just lets you know that we're only— I've just selected headlines, so we're only looking at headlines in through here. So what we generally look at from here is that you want to just go through and you want to see which headlines are performing the best and which ones are not. And what you can do from there is I generally like to follow the money. What you generally find with Performance Max is you can see as we're going down, you get a whole heap of headlines which Google is just not spending on, and they're the ones that I'll go through and change them. Uh, I will at this end of the video give you some extra teaching on how you can improve your headlines, because we have a, a really big framework around that. In this video, I just wanted to let you know where you can find that data. So what you then from there is you go through, find out the, the headlines which are underperforming or the descriptions that are underperforming. So what you want to do is you want to take a note of the different headlines that you want to go through and change. And where you need to go from there is that you then, then need to go back into your asset groups, and then you can go through and edit and add those new asset headlines or descriptions that you want to get. So you firstly find out which are the ones which are giving you the worst performance in terms of click-through ratio and conversion metrics, and then go through and update those headlines or descriptions. Now, the other thing that you do want to do is remembering that with Performance Max is that it's— or any Google Ads campaign— it's not only about your headlines and your ad copy and what's happening inside of your Google Ads campaign. You also need to make sure that the landing page you're sending them to is converting. So the way that you can go through and check that is that if you go into your, into your insights and reports, go into your report editor, and you'll see a report which is called the landing page report. If you haven't used it before, if you go into your ads and assets, you'll see landing pages in through here. And then what this is doing is that this has, we've only got our, we've only got our Performance Max campaign in here. And then what you can do from there is once again, you're just looking at your click-through ratio, looking at your conversion metrics. And if you are not seeing good conversion metrics inside of these different landing pages, you know that you need to then go and do some optimizations on those landing pages to get better results for your Performance Max campaigns. All right, thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here. And remember, as at the core of success with Performance Max, you need to make sure you've got enough data as a start before you introduce Performance Max. And if you want to watch a video on the exact scenarios where we use Performance Max,, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. And if you wanted to see that video about bidding strategies and how to get those right for your Performance Max campaigns or for any campaigns, go through and watch this video right here. Hey, absolute pleasure having you here. Remember, you do need more help with your Google Ads campaigns. At Define Digital Academy, we have lots of different options for business owners and brand owners like you where we can help you in your current stage of growth. So right from starting day one all the way up to businesses spending more than $100,000 a month in Google Ads. We've got options that can help you. So why don't you follow that link in the description below, fill out that form, or get those free assets or free Google Ads toolkits that we provide as part of the learning with Define Digital Academy. Thank you for joining me. See you next time.