How to Set Up Performance Max Campaigns for Lead Generation

In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a Performance Max campaign for Lead Generation the right way. I'm not a huge fan of Performance Max campaigns for Lead generation because a lot of times it results in spammy junky lead quality. However, if you set up the campaign in the way I'm going to show you, you will prevent that and you can actually get strong performance from Performance Max for your lead generation efforts. Let's dive in. Okay, before we dive into actually setting up a campaign, I have this doc here. This is actually a document from a training I've already done on this in our group called PPC Copilot. A link to that group will be in the description below. I do a weekly Q A there have course material in there, ongoing training. So this is where this document lives. There's a few. I'm not going to go through all of this, but there's a few things that I do want to go through and one of those is impact on search campaigns. You have to remember Performance Max will complement your standard search campaigns. But and I always tell and recommend people this, if you have not created a Performance Max campaign yet and you're running standard search campaigns, you have to keep an eye out on the baseline that you're currently getting from standard search because Performance Max is prone to steal some conversions from your standard search campaigns. So what would have originally before you created a Performance Max campaign, gone to standard search, now goes to Performance Max. So I have seen cases where people create a Performance Max campaign for lead generation efforts and they're like, wow, cool. It's, it's doing wonderfully. And then you look at the aggregate data of the account and they're not net positive at all. It's just because Performance Max took away from standard search. So that can happen. It's rare that it does it to that level where you don't. You're not net positive at all. But. But you have to know how they both behave together. So Performance Max complements exit existing search campaigns and respects your keyword targeting. However, that will be determined by match type. So if a user's query is identical to an eligible search query or sorry, search keyword of any match type in your account, the search campaign will be prioritized over Performance Max. If you if the query is not identical to an eligible search keyword, the campaign or ad with the highest ad rank, which considers creative, relevance and performance, will be selected. So again, if you have a keyword in your standard search campaigns and that is the exact search someone is doing that creates the or fires the ad in the auction, Google will yield to the search campaign. However, if it's not exactly searched in that way and your ads firing due to broad or phrase match, then the ad rank is where Google's going to determine to fire it in your standard search campaign or Performance Max campaign. So there can be some overlap. So just because you have a standard search campaign doesn't ultimately mean you're only going to get the searches for those keywords in the standard search campaign. It could go to Performance Max if it's not an exact identical search as I mentioned up here. So that is why to me exact match is very important. So example of keyword match times winning campaigns exact match keyword is is used so it will actually what which ad is shown search campaign wins broader phrase match it's who has the highest ad rank could be pmax or it could be your standard search at times. And this is key you may see existing keywords shown in your Performance Max instead of search campaign. Due to ineligibility factors, a search keyword is not eligible to trigger an ad if the campaign is limited by budget, has low search volume status, all creative or landing pages for the ad groups are disapproved. All campaign or ad group targeting isn't met. Okay, so you may see some of what your average or bidding on inside of your search campaign and you're like why am I seeing this in the Performance Max campaign instead of search? Well, if your search campaign hit budget that day Google and your Performance Max campaign hasn't Google's going to start showing those searches now. The performance Performance Max campaign. So you just have to remember how these two can behave so you don't get confused by the data as you start getting into the weeds of it after launching. Okay, some essentials right Conversion tracking. You must have correct conversion tracking in place. I always recommend using the Google Ads tag, not a GA4 import. Make sure enhanced conversions tracked is tracking and set up correctly and for lead generation. Typically you're going to want to be tracking form submissions or phone calls or both. However, if you're doing call tracking, make sure you're tracking call duration thresholds that are meaningful to you. So not 10 seconds. Again, the what I'm going to show you in the build out of the Performance Max campaign is to prevent low quality spam leads and junk conversions which performance Max is prone to do. I have done audits where their performance Max campaign set up to track phone calls and the phone call is set to a 10 second call duration. They get lots of phone call conversions, but none of them are good. When you actually look into the back end of those call recordings. And a lot of times like why are you guys tracking anything that's 10 seconds? You should have a proper call duration set up that is meaningful for you. So if a call must be at least two minutes before it would actually turn into something valuable to you for your business, then make sure you're tracking calls. And especially in the Performance Max campaign tracking settings must be set to at least a two minute. Well, you goes by seconds, so you would be doing 120 seconds in that case call duration. But you do not want to have low quality conversions being tracked in that Performance Max campaign because you will end up with a lot of low quality leads, low quality calls and junky spam performance and you're not going to be happy. Okay, budget requirements. You must have enough daily budget to hit your target CPA goal at at least once per day. Okay? So if your goal is a $50 cost per acquisition, again that's going to be form fills or phone calls for most of you, then you need at least a $50 daily budget. Right? So I've done many audits where they're like, well, we want a $50cpa but I only have $20 to give. Performance Max campaign, don't run it. You're not going. You need to at least get a conversion per day. So if you can't give it enough budget to to hit one conversion per day based off of your CPA goal, then don't run it. So that's how you would start. That's at least the bare minimum budget requirement for a Performance Max campaign for lead generation. Okay, don't start with Performance Max. All right, so if you're just getting going, stick to standard search campaigns. I have plenty of training on search campaign setups and optimization. That will be those videos will be in the description below. Or again, you can go check out our school group called PPC Copilot where I do I have my trainings there and, and then you get direct access to me as well. But do not start with Performance Max for lead generation. You start with standard search campaigns. You get those dialed in, you get those working and then you move into Performance Max. Okay, and within Performance Max, what you're going to do because basically Performance Max acts as like a back channel of all the other Google placements for you after you've got search work working for you for your lead generation efforts and what you normally and what I normally would recommend doing is whatever your goal is and your performance is on your standard search campaign is kind of what you ask for performance max to hit. So if you're averaging a hundred dollar CPA from your standard search campaigns, then we move into system performance Max. We leave those campaigns alone, but we start firing up performance max for lead gen and we just immediately go into a hundred dollar search CPA goals. Now I'll go into that right as we go through the build out. But I always start with search campaigns for lead generation. I never start with Performance Max Landing page requirements. This is huge. You must have a high converting designated landing page specifically for Performance Max traffic. This will allow for you to have quality control of what performance max is providing you. It will allow you to actually understand the conversions and leads and calls that you get from Performance Max versus your other campaigns. If you don't use a designated landing page, you'll never know. And then you'll be like, well I feel like the, you know, low quality has increased. Where is it coming from? You're going to be guessing at that point. So unless you have, you know, CRM tracking and all that. So what we have found, the best results we get are from a designated landing page for Performance Max only. I have a video on how we do that also with some spam prevention that we have implemented within our landing page process for Performance Max campaigns for Legion. That video will be in the description below if you want to check that out. But do make sure you go into this knowing you're going to want a designated landing page for Performance Max. And again, I'll show you this in the build out best practices for campaign structure. Don't overcomplicate it. It's very simple. However, you do want to keep your services separate. So if you're a home remodeler, do not mix roofing with bathroom remodels. Those would be two separate campaigns, right? So you're going to have theme based segmentation and so you can split campaigns by services you're targeting and then also consider the CPA target differences, right? So if you have a commercial side to your business and a residential side to your business and and those have unique sort of cost per acquisition goals for the leads that you're generating there. Then split those out, right? Don't mix them, but keep it simple with your campaign builds. You don't want to overcomplicate this. So again, services separated where it makes sense, theme based segmentation and consider gold differences. Especially if you have huge variances in what you're willing to pay for CPAs of the leads that are being generated. Okay, I am inside of an actual account now and I'm going to go through the process of creating a campaign. So I'm going to click this create campaign button. Then you're going to have these objections you can go or objectives you can go through, like here and go leads if you want. However, these just filter the settings that you get. They do not influence how the campaign actually operates. So what I do a lot of times is put create a campaign without guidance. Then I'm going to hit Performance Max. And then here you're going to have your conversion tracking. Now remember I told you you must have high quality conversion tracking set up already. So make sure you have that before you set up Performance max. Because again, if you have low quality conversion tracking, like you're tracking calls that are only 10 seconds long or something like that, you're going to get low quality results from this Performance max campaign and it will fuel that forever until you fix it. So do not start until you have that. In this case, we already have really high quality conversion tracking set up for phone calls and lead form submission. So we're all good here. Then where do people go after the click? You don't actually have to put this. So I'm going to hit continue. Okay, then we're going to name it. I've already put a name in here, just PMAX roofing. And I put YouTube just because this is for the YouTube video here. So I'm going to hit continue. Okay, bidding. I recommend, and I talked about this in the beginning of the video, you do not start with Performance max. I always recommend starting with search campaigns. Right. For lead generation at least your goals that you're hitting from your standard search campaigns is what you're going to use for performance max. So if you're hitting a $50 CPA or you're hitting $100 CPA in your standard search campaigns already, then you just start with that in your performance max. So in this case, I'm going to start with a $50. This is Australian, but this is a $50 target CPA. Again, the reason I'm doing that is because that is already the performance I'm getting from standard search. I'm building performance max because it complements search, if done correctly, as more of a back channel to some of the other placements. Now obviously this will include search traffic as well, which I talked about too. But I am not starting a brand new performance max campaign for Legion. I never recommend that. I always start with standard search. Then as I get that working, I'm building performance Max afterwards. So this is how I'm coming up with my bid strategy of this $50 CPA because that is what I'm hitting successfully from standard search campaigns and that is the goal of this current client. Okay then there's a setting here called customer acquisition. This is something that you don't even need to worry about right now. This goes back to more of an optimization stage. I actually don't worry about this during the build out phase. A lot of times I don't even use this setting. I know a lot of people will talk about I only do this for the bid for new customers only. Quick thing there just in case you're one of those people. I just think Google doesn't do a good job of tracking new versus return. Anyways. Now I'm not saying I don't use this. I talk about this in future trainings. More advanced stuff in this build out though of this campaign for most of you don't even worry about it right now. So just keep it unchecked. Okay, so location targeting, we're targeting Australia English then this is key. Okay, there's this setting here. Let Google AI optimize assets. We don't actually want this. Why? Because Google is going to. You see this piece here? Final URL. This is allowing Google to send traffic to other pages than the landing page you give it. Right. Basically it acts like a dynamic search campaign at this point. However, the whole idea of Performance Max for Legion is to really have quality control over it because it's prone to generate a lot of low quality leads. So what I do here is, is I turn this off and you do not want final URL ever turned on. And remember I talked about in the beginning of this video having a designated landing page for this campaign. If we had this turned on that defeats the entire purpose of it. And now you don't have that quality control that I really want. So you must have this turned off. Now there is a piece here called customization. Use text from your site landing pages, ads and it provides assets to create customized ad copy. This is allowing Google to create ad copy for you based off of the contextual information they find on your landing page and websites. I usually have this turned off in the beginning. Then there's a video enhancement piece. You want to be able to give Google a video because if you don't they will auto create one for you inside a Performance Max campaign. I actually do allow the enhancement piece on so this will just allow Google to enhance any video that you get it during the build out phase. There's more information you can go through here, but I actually do use this setting. Okay then if you click more settings you're going to find a schedule. If let's say you're only, for whatever reason you can only take leads Monday through Friday. That will be here. So you can set all of that up here if you want. In this case Iran all day. So we're going to have that turned to all day. And, and then if you have URL tracking parameters or anything, you can put that in here as well. So there's a few other settings here. The main, other setting that I would recommend doing, it's called brand exclusions. I do not recommend for PMAX for Legion to run brand search terms there. So what do I recommend you do you use a brand exclusion list. So here let's say your Nike, you would create a Nike brand list and so Google has basically an indexed list of terms for the brand Nike. Now again I'm just using Nike as an example, but I recommend excluding your brand from your performance max campaign. You do not want it to skew the data because what would happen is if you don't exclude your brand name and let's say your, your name is, let's say you're, you know, John's Roofing Services. If you don't exclude your brand from the campaign, then what's going to happen is you're going to get brand searches inside of this performance max campaign. From an aggregate level, the campaign looks like it's doing well, but the reality is it's repeat customers who are searching for you. Right. So I want to make sure that I have this campaign again, full quality control over it. So I do not normally recommend running brand in the performance max campaign for your Legion efforts. So use the brand exclusion setting in the campaign build out. Now Nike's indexed. I just used John's Roofing services as an example. This might not be added. So if I do John's Roofing services, if that's not, if your brand is not indexed, you can hit request a brand and then Google will add your brand to a brand exclusion list. It does take a little bit of time. So if your brand, if you don't see your brand here, don't freak out, you can request it. Okay, you come up to this asset generation piece. This is like an AI thing. I am going to skip this. We don't need this. I'm going to show you how to build an asset group the right way. Okay, so now I'm building the asset group. This is for roofing services. And then here we've got search themes. So what are some words or phrases people use when searching for your product or searches? This is very simple. You don't need to use 25, but you can add up to 25. But here you just take some of your top searches. So like roofing services, roof replacement, roof restoration. You don't even have to go like I'm, I'm not kidding. Five to ten, you're good. So continue to add any search themes here that you want to provide. Google, this is not targeting. Do not think of this as keyword targeting. It's totally different. These are, you're just telling Google here are, here are themes or phrases people use when searching for my product or service. So you're just kind of indicating to Google what people are interested in. Now remember we're building this campaign after already building and working with search campaigns because if you I recommend not starting with performance max right for lead generation. So Google's already going to have historical data on your converters. So search themes to me aren't really that important. But I do add them in here usually on a new campaign build. Okay, audience signals. Again this is not targeting. These are just signals to Google on. Hey, here are some are, here's some data for you on what my customer might look like or what my customer might be interested in. So here what I normally recommend add some remarketing audiences if you have it add and then you're already using search themes. You could also build out some additional like data here. So if we go to like in market they have a roofing services. So I may add that I honestly don't put a lot of value into audience signals. If you've ever watched any of my other performance max trainings that I've done, I've done tests. Audience signals to me are great if you're a brand, brand new account. But again I'm not a brand new account here and I'm not recommending brand new accounts. Start with performance max. So to me audience signals. Google already knows my converters and my customers before I start a performance max campaign because I've already been running usually successful account before I even dive into performance max. And Google has the ability with audience signals to go beyond what you give it. So it's not targeting, it's just kind of like you giving Google like hey, here's some information on my, my customers. So here I don't Go crazy with it. Some remarketing audiences, maybe some in market. If you have some clear demographic differences here, then maybe you can do that. But I don't. Again, I really don't give a lot of value to the audience signals. Okay, this is kind of new. It's called brand guidelines. It controls how your brand appears in ads for the campaigns. There's some more information on it while you're in the process if you want. Like you can give brand colors, logos, everything else. So here I'm just going to simply go through this real quick. Okay, now we're in the actual asset building section here, so we're going to start with final URL. Right? And remember, part of what I recommend is you use a landing page that's designated for Performance Max traffic only. Why? Quality control. So here is the page that I have. The URL will probably be blocked. I do want to show you this piece though. So this URL will be blurred other than this last piece of it and it says pmax. Why am I showing you that? This landing page is the same landing page I use in my standard search campaigns. Right? All I did was duplicated it and then the URL is now unique. So it's just. It's the same design, same everything, just a unique URL. I even put PMAX in the URL for sake of ease. But I know the only traffic that can come to this page is from Performance Max, right? So I have full quality control. Any conversions that are generated from this page, I know they came from Performance Max campaign traffic. So I'm able to determine is this good high quality stuff Performance Max has given me, or is it still low quality junky leads that I don't want. This gives me that quality control. Okay, then I've got calls. So this is already set up. This is my call extension. Then you're going to have up to 15 headlines. You can provide it. I gave it eight in this case. Use up to 15 if you can. However, if you start repeating yourself so you're saying the same thing and over and over again and just different small variations of it, then stop. Don't add fluff. The whole idea is to have correct ad testing with the variations. So if you're just saying roof restoration over and over again, but differently, just stop. So don't add fluff, don't get nervous that, oh, I didn't add all 15. Do 15 headlines and add 15 headlines if it actually is impactful headlines. If it's not, then just stop. And in this case I've Got eight and I'm good with that. Then long headlines, you get up to five. I just added two here. Again, same thing. Add as many as you can, as long as they're unique. And then descriptions, you can add up to five. I added two. Two are required. Again, add up to five, as long as they're unique. Now images, you can add up to 20. I, I do recommend adding 20 images. I am going to just quickly add some here. So I've got 10. But absolutely try to fill up 20 images with AI tools today and image generators. You should, you should be able to get 20 images generated. And it can be the same image. It's just different sizes as you can see here. Like there's three, three images in this region here. Those are just the same image, different sizes. So that would count as three images in this case. So it's very easy to get 20 images. I absolutely do recommend trying to utilize all 20. Now, video. This is important. If you don't have a video, Google will automatically create one. In most cases you don't want that to happen. The video that Google creates is horrendous looking. So ironically, I don't have a video right now for this specific case. I'm going to have to leave this blank. But just know if you leave it blank, Google will make a video for you and you do not want that. Okay. Site links. These would be other links then to pages on your website. Now you can add these. And I, I still recommend that even though you're gonna be like Austin, you just said though that you want quality control and you gave it a designated landing page for performance max. Yes. Most traffic won't click your site link. And so if you're going to create a site link, you can, you know, add relevant pages there that the traffic would go to. Right. If you had an About Us page or an FAQ page or something like that. I don't stress too much about that in the beginning. In this case, I'm not even going to build sitelinks. You can test having zero site links in your performance max campaign, especially if you really want 100% full quality control like I'm talking about. But just know if you do add site links, those clickers, people who click those site links will go to the pages that are a part of that site link. If you want more information on site links and add assets that you can add, because there's a lot of them, I have a full video on that. It's four search campaigns, but it's the same thing for Performance max. That video will be in the description below. So go check that out. Okay, There's a call to action. I leave it on automated, but you can choose one if you really want. So here we could just do get a quote. Again, I leave it on automated because a lot times I just let the algorithm figure it out. Now we've got more asset types that you can add. So there's promos, prices, messages, structured snippets, lead forms, call outs. I'm not going to go through these one by one. Again, I do. I have a video on this that you can go watch. If you want to learn more about all of these different ad assets, here's my recommendation. Add as many that are relevant to your business and that's all you need to know. Okay, there's this more options like display path. You could add in some keyword stuff here like roofing if you wanted to, just like you would have with a search campaign. There's some URLs for mobile, if you have different final URLs for mobile traffic, and then you can do some URL rules as a feature. I don't need any of this stuff right now. Most of you probably won't either. Again, other than you could add a display path, this to me is more important for search campaigns than it is performance max. But up to you. You can add that if you want. Again, I'm not going to, so I'm going to hit next. Now I'm on budget. Remember I told you the the bare minimum budget you should have for this campaign is what your CPA goal is. So if your CPA goal is 50, you should have a bare minimum daily budget of 50 that allows you to at least hit one conversion per day because you ideally want to have 30 plus conversions a month inside of a performance max campaign for consistency of the machine learning. Now, in this case my goal is 50, but I've got a little more money than that. So I've got a hundred that I'm going to give to it, right? So if you can do that, give more. But bare minimum has to be what your CPA goal is, then you're ready to publish. So all you do is hit this blue publish campaign and it will publish the campaign to your account. Okay, there we go. My campaign is now published and inside of my account I always make sure to double check the campaign settings. So just hover over here and I'm going to go through my campaign settings real quick. So here I've got a 50 CPA goal, a hundred dollar budget. I'm targeting Australia, which is what I want. All of this looks good and then I always make sure. You're usually going to need some time just to make sure your assets get approved. Not always. So you see status as pending asset group under review. So this can take some time, you know, an hour or two, sometimes even a bit longer. So just keep an eye out on that. Make sure to check in after the build to make sure your assets don't get disapproved. If they get disapproved, you will get notified. But I always do a double check after I actually hit publish. There you go. You now know how to create a performance max campaign for lead generation the right way so you don't end up with low quality quality conversions. You end up with high quality leads that make ultimately more money for your business. I hope if as long as you follow the process that I showed you in this video. Hey, if you want more access from me, you want help from me, then go check out PPC Copilot. It's my courses, my ongoing trainings. I do a weekly Q and A session and video feedback reviews. I don't know anyone else who does that. It's as close to one on one consulting as it gets. You can send me privately a video of your account and your question. I'll watch it and I'll actually give you a response back in video format. Again, that is PPC Copilot. The link to that group will be in the description below. Or maybe you're a business owner or work internally for a company and you're like, I don't want to learn anymore. I just need some experts to help us. Then go get a free audit from my team. In that audit, we will get under the hood of your account and show you practically what you can do to improve the results of your Google Ads performance. So again, if you want my team of experts to take a look at your account and give you practical advice on improving the results if you qualify, we will do that for free. So to go get that, go fill out the form for a free account audit. The link to that will be in the description below as well. And maybe you don't want any of that. That's cool too. I'll see you on the next video.