Performance Max Campaign Set Up Guide | Google Ads Tutorial 2023 [UPDATED for the New Dashboard]

Google Ads is currently in the process of updating the look and feel of its Google Ads Dashboard. And much of the reason for this is because of the introduction of Google's newest campaign type, Performance Max campaigns. So, because we received so many requests for people showing me how to give an updated version of how to set up a performance max campaign with Google Ads new dashboard, that's what I wanted to do in this video is take you through the step by step process and how to set up your very own Performance Max campaign in Google Ads. Now. Now, if you're new to the world of Google Ads, Performance max has only been around since the end of 2021. And it has some core differences to the other types of campaigns. And that first difference is that it's one campaign that shows your ads to all of the available networks in Google, including search, shopping, YouTube or video campaigns, display all those image ads, and also Gmail ads. And then the other core difference with your Performance Max campaigns, it has an inbuilt display discovery and also an inbuilt remarketing function. And what that means is that in that discovery phase, Google will show your ads to people who haven't even completed any searches for your products or your services before. And Google is targeting people based off their own internal data from different websites or similar products or services in your business niche. And then that remarketing function is that once someone has interacted with one of your ads or they've gone through and visited your website, and Google will continue to show your ads. So not only those search and shopping ads, but also your image ads or your YouTube ads until you get that conversion. Now, the one thing that it does mean with Performance Max campaigns, and you need to keep this in mind, is that that can mean that it can take a lot longer for those conversions to start to appear. And for one of my own businesses, in the first three weeks, we only got two conversions, and then week four, we got eight conversions. With week five, we got 10 conversions, and then week six, we actually got over 20 conversions. So that's how quickly things can change with the performance max. But I did just want to give that little caveat and warning that it can take up to one month until you really start to see those conversions come through. The reason for that is, as I said, is that Google is going out and finding people before they've even searched for your business service or your product. So that gives you a little bit of extra information about Performance Max campaigns. But what I want to do now, before we go into that Step by step process of how to set up your very own performance max campaign. I want to break down for you the structure that you need to be using for your performance max campaigns. So let's now go through the performance max campaign structure that you need to be using. And the way that you need to think about with your performance max structure is that we've got your Google Ads accounts is that you still have your campaigns. So the reason for why you would have different campaigns is mainly for two reasons. One, if you wanted to target different locations. So let's just say in this campaign we wanted to target London only, whereas in this campaign you wanted to target some other areas, say for example, like Manchester. And the reason for why you would do that is it's so that you can control the budget. You may just want to have a whole country based campaign which is no problems at all. I do that for the majority of my campaigns. The other reason for why you would have different campaigns is if you've got them based around different products. So for example, we've got some accounts which are set up and we've got performance max campaigns which are just targeting women's crop tops and then we've got other campaigns which are targeting another range of their products which are women's capris or jogger pants. Now underneath your campaigns is what's called asset groups. Now if you're familiar with Google Ads, an asset group is very, very similar to an ad group. And what that is is that within that asset group you have your different products or your keywords grouped together and then they go through to your different product and landing pages. So for example, when we said here we've got a campaign which is targeting different capris and jogger pants, we would have one asset group about Capri pants and then another asset group about jogger pants. So they're in the same product category, but because they' different sub product, that's why we'd put them in different asset groups. And the benefit of that is that as you see, when we go through the setup process, you can tailor your ad copy and your images for these different products. And that's one of the best features about the asset groups, which would be something different for people who have run shopping campaigns before. Because in performance max you do have a level of control over the images and also the ad copy. So now that we've gone through the overview of how you need to structure your performance max campaigns in Google Ads, having those asset groups which are defined around clear products or subcategories, What I want to take you through now is the step by step process in how you go about setting up your very own Performance Max campaign. Now if you do miss any of these steps, you don't need to be worried because if you follow that link in the description below, you can go to my updated Performance Max campaign setup guide. And this is a guide which has all the different screenshots which I'm going to be taking you through so that you can follow it along at a slower pace if you miss any of these steps. So right now let's jump into an extended screen share so that I can show you how to set up your very own Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads in 2023 with the new Google Ads dashboard design. Let's go. So when you're in Google Ads, you've got two options. You can either go to this Create function. The Create button allows you to create a new campaign ad group, search keywords or conversion action. Or you can just go straight over to new campaign. And that's the option that we're going to use today because we're doing this for an E commerce business, we're going to be choosing Sales. Now you can also use Max for service based industries, but for today's example, I'm going to be showing you how to do it for an E commerce store. Now it's exactly the same process. The only difference would be is that you don't have a product feed. And when we get to that point, I'll just mark that out so that you can still follow this along even if you're doing a service based business. So you go through and click Sales. If you're using Performance Max for a service based industry, you would choose leads and then from there you want to go through and select your conversions. So we're going to just be focusing on purchases. Now if you do have multiple conversion actions, what you can do is you can click on on these three different buttons and you can remove certain goals. This one is grayed out because we've only got one purchases goal in this account. If you remove it at this campaign setup function, it's important to note that that doesn't remove the conversion action, it's just removing it from this individual campaign. Then you go through and click on continue. And obviously we want to be selecting Performance Max. Now we've already linked up our merchant feed and this is the section where I was saying that if you're just using Performance Max for a service based industry, you wouldn't have this step. So we've got our merchant center in there. Now this campaign name, this only internal so no one else sees it. Now what I'm going to do here is that we've already got a campaign running in targeting Australia. So we're going to set up another campaign for the New Zealand market. So we're going to have our product name and just add the New Zealand name at the end. Once again, the reason why we're doing that is so that we can know internally that this is a different country. Then we click continue. Now in here you can either target for conversions or conversion value. Because this is an E Commerce, we're going to select conversion value. Now, because this is a new campaign and we're targeting a new area, I would recommend not adding in a target ROAS or a target return on ad spend. So we could select that, but I'm not going to select that for this option. And then from there as well you can optimize the campaign for acquiring new customers. If you do get in this option, you can even select where you only want to bid for your new customers. But you do need to have some existing audiences. So I'm just going to keep this blank. And the reason for that is because obviously most of the people who are watching this tutorial new to Google Ads, so they wouldn't have any defined audiences. And that's kind of a more advanced option. So let's just keep it like an is for the moment and go through and select next. Now this is where we can target our different locations. As I said, we're going to be targeting the country of New Zealand. Now the other thing that I would say in here as well is you don't actually have to target by countries. You can also target by states, cities, postcodes or zip codes. And then you have the option for your language. Now the one thing that I would say with languages in Google Ads is that you need to only target one language per campaign. And the reason for that is because Google does not translate your ad copy. So if you wanted to also target multiple languages, I would set them up in separate campaigns. Now you do have this option for automatically created assets. So what this will do is that this allows Google. So now we still do get to put in our own asset routes. But Google does actually have control over your text assets and your final URL. I have tested this and I've actually seen that when used correctly, this does actually provide better results. So the only thing that I would recommend is that you may want to go through and exclude some URLs say for example, what you could do through here, if you don't want it to go to any of your blog pages, you could add that in there. Or if you didn't want it to go through your contact page or the other reason for why you may do it is that if you're targeting some different products and you only wanted to have a specific product. So with this one, we've got babies products and kids products. And if we only want to target our kids products, we could type in because we have a URL extension where all of our baby products have the URL infant. So by adding that in there, that's going to limit it from there. So that's a way where you can still have this automated function set up, but that you're putting control over the the different products that you are marketing and the different pages that Google is getting data from. Then from there we want to click next. Now this comes to the time for where we're setting up our asset groups. Now, as I said, we're going to be targeting kids our kids products. And we're also targeting New Zealand. Once again, the asset group name is only for internal use, but that just makes it easier for us to be able to know what we're targeting. Now when it comes to all of the products, by default it would target all of your products. But if you wanted to, and you wanted to only target a selection of products, you can go down to product type. Now this comes down to the different types of types of breakups that you have in your product feed. So let's just say that we wanted to go through here. We're just going to select baby and toddler and if you wanted to, you can even break that down by the item id. So if you know specific items that you wanted to target, you can go through and target them from there. So let's just go down to the brand and click Save. Now from here you can go through and select your URL and you've got the option to add in up to 20 different images. When you do add in these images, you can either upload them, you can either also add from your website. So this will scan your website and we've already got some uploaded. So we're just going to go through and just select some different images. As I said, I would Recommend Adding about 20, but we're just going to add 4 or 5 just for the time being. Then you can also add your logos. Now with the videos, the videos do have to be a YouTube video or what you can actually do is if you wanted to, you can create your own video. And it's basically just a template. It's a step by step easy process. We won't go through that. But your other option is is once again you can write in YouTube URL. If you don't do this, Google will automatically create it for you. And then from there you can go through and you can add up to five different headlines and up to four descriptions and also five different long headlines. Now the way that this will work is as well is that obviously the headlines are for your search campaigns, the long headlines are for your display and video campaigns and the descriptions also go in your search campaign for ease. Now I would recommend that you've written this already for this examp. Just going to use the suggestions from Google. Now these suggestions, they do need more work because you recommend that you want to be having some strong call to action. So let's just say that you've got a 20% sale. You can add in that information in from there. Same with the longer headlines. I'm just going to go through and add in some headlines and some descriptions now. Now I would recommend that you add those five headlines and you add those different descriptions. But I've just added enough so that we can get this campaign going. Now when it comes to adding in an audience signal, what's really important to note is that you do want to add in an audience signal and this allow you to add in some different and we're going to just call this New Zealand. Again you can add in some different keywords. So you would add in a new segment and Google will give you some recommendations. Now if you're happy with the recommendations, you can add these. You can also add your own. I'm just adding three or four. The more that you can add the better. Now if you're setting up a new performance max campaign in an existing Google Ads account, the reason for why you want to add in all of your current data is because this gives a really strong signal to Google on the type of people that convert for your products. So I would highly recommend that you add in your data. And what this does is it allows Google to get to the end destination of getting more conversions for your business faster. Then what you also want to do is you want to add in some different interests. Now you would add in things which are based around your product. So because this is a baby product, what we'd want to be doing as well is a good one to go into is this detailed demographics and adding in the parental status and really targeting people who are of our age bracket. So this product is really highly defined for parents who have kids up to five years old. So we've added those in. You can add in more. And then from there you go through and click save. Now the one thing that I do want to highlight from here is that you've added your signal. Now this is giving Google some initial selections, but Google will go beyond these selections. So it is important to note that this is just a baseline figure that Google takes on and it takes it further. Then you go through. Click next. We want to add in our budget. Now it's important to note that this budget, you set it for a day, but it works it out for a monthly budget. So if you wanted to spend $300 a month, you would set it as $10 a day. If you wanted to do $450 a month and you spend, you would set your budget to $15 a day. The other important thing to note there is that because you've set this daily budget at $10, it doesn't mean that you'll spend $10 every day. Once again, it comes out to that monthly. So some days you may spend $15, other days you may spend $5 and it works out to get that average of that $10 a day. Then you go through and click Next. Then from there Google will do a summary and it just goes through checks to make sure that you've got everything. If there are any issues, it'll let you know. And then once you once it's good to go, you go through and click publish your campaign and congratulations, you've now got your Performance Max campaign set up using the new dashboard. So remember as I said, that if you did miss any of those steps or you want to be able to follow on in a slower approach, remember to follow that link in the description below to get your copy of my Performance Max Campaign Setup guide. Thank you for joining me. My name is Aaron young, I'm from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour, our Google Ads Master. Now that you've got your Performance Max campaign set up, the next important step is that you need to know how to optimize your Performance Max campaign. And that's why right here I want you to go through and watch this video which shows you the step by step process and how to optimize your Performance Max campaigns. See you later. Bye.