The RIGHT Way to Set Up Performance Max Campaigns (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's video I have a complete tutorial on how to set up Performance Max campaigns the right way. Also, it includes search themes which is brand new to Performance Max campaigns. So I show you how to even set up the search themes now which is recently added to Performance Max campaign setups. So let's dive in. How to set up a Performance Max Campaign Complete Guide so I'm inside of an account. I am going to create a new campaign. You can choose your objective for E commerce. Normally it's going to be sales. If you were doing lead generation then you can click leads. Here's the thing, I most of the time just hit create without a goals guidance. All choosing one of these settings does is it optimizes the settings. It's going to show you during the build out to make it easier for you. I don't necessarily need that. I already know the settings I need. So a lot of times I'm just hitting create a campaign without a goals guidance. That does not interfere in how the campaign performs. Whether I click this or this, it just gives you different options. So this basically I'm telling Google give me all of the campaign options available. I'll choose what I want. This is going to try to steer you in a simple optimized way of building out a campaign that's around sales. So again I'm just going to click create a campaign without a goals guidance. Then I am going to select Performance Max and conversions. I only want purchases do not for Performance max. Do not put in anything else in here. Phone calls maybe, but I stick to mainly just purchases. But definitely no add to carts, no micro conversions. You only only want your macro conversion. And for this it's going to be purchases. So I have purchases selected. Then I have my merchant center account linked. So we're all good there. And where should people go after they click your ad? So this is going to give you or at least Google information then for the dynamic search ad piece. So I'm giving it our website and then simply name it. And in this case I'm just going to put test. Boom. Okay, bidding. This is a brand new campaign I'm building now. In the course I have a full bidding section on what to do and when with your bidding. But if you're just starting out, stick to conversion value or conversions and do not put in a target. You need to get data and conversion volume first. Then you move over to setting target. So starting out don't actually put a target in there. So I'M going to have it set to maximize conversion value Customer Acquisition Optimized campaign for acquiring new customers in the course I talk about this in the optimization section only choose this if you specifically have a strategy and know what the customer acquisition strategy or setting does. For this case, I do not want this on and I would say 90% of the performance max campaigns we run we have this turned off only in specific cases where we're running a unique strategy where we want no remarketing potential in the campaigns and we're only trying to laser in on new customer acquisition that we have that turned on. But in most cases, even on the accounts that I audit, most cases this is turned off. Then next okay, so location United States is where we sell. So I'm going to click United States. I'm going to show you after I create this campaign, it's a highly important setting to go back and check because you actually need to go input a different setting for locations that they do not give you the option to do when you're actually building the campaign out. It's a very sneaky thing by Google. I mean again, a money grab in my opinion. So I'll show you what to do after we build that out. On why you need to go back to your location settings once you complete the build out of the campaign languages I'm just going to have it set to English. If you want to go a little more broad, you could just put all languages but English is fine. Automatically created assets Google's going to have this checked. In fact, it had it even hidden. So you have to kind of click this down button. This is giving Google the ability to expand your URLs. I talk about that in the course. And also text assets as well. It's giving you. It's giving Google the ability to create different headlines and text assets based off of the landing pages and what it's crawled on your website and what it believes could improve click through rate for your ad copy. If you want to be conservative in the beginning, then go ahead and turn these off. There's nothing wrong with that. And then if you get your campaign working and you want to start trying to scale it further, you could come back and turn these on. If you're going to leave them on, then I still do recommend you need to exclude some URLs here. I talk about that in the course as well. But a lot of times you're going to want to take out like blog URLs if you have any other sort of article based URL'S those are huge. So but a lot of times I don't want to send to my blog traffic because it's not set up to be monetized in steering that traffic into purchases. So for this I am going to set it to URL contains blog to get exclude. So that's a basically a rule to wipe out all of my blog pages. Do not crawl the blog, do not send any traffic to my blog. But I am allowing Google in this case then to expand the URLs that's going to send traffic to. If I have it turned off, then what it's going to do is only send traffic to the URL. I give it inside of the asset group, which I'll show you when we build those out. Or if it's a product ad, then the product page of that specific product shopping ad. So turned off, very conservative, turned on. You're flicking on the dynamic search ad piece of the campaign. So I'm going to turn it off for this case. But I do run this a lot of times in most the campaigns I don't find any issues with it and I tend to have better performance. But I do make sure I'm excluding URLs that I do not want Google to crawl and send traffic to. But for now we're just going to have this turned off. Then more settings, ad schedule. I have it all day. If you have, you know, for whatever reason, weekends or days that you just absolutely don't want to run ads, then this is where you would set that up. But I don't need to do that for this campaign. Then start and end dates. Don't even mess with this. Do not put an end date. I don't know why you would. I have audited accounts where they would have end dates and then they just kept building new campaigns once they would end. So it's just like don't add an end date. You. You don't want this campaign ever to end. And if you need to shut it off, you can just manually pause it out yourself. So no settings there. You need to change campaign URL options. If you had some unique sort of tracking templates that you need to set up, this is where you would do it. We have auto, you know, tagging setup, so we're fine there. Brand exclusions. I talk about this as well. In the course, if you want to exclude your brand terms from the campaign, you can do it through a brand exclusion. So I already have this set up, so I'm just going to go ahead and actually put that in there. This now makes sure none of my brand terms are going to show in this campaign. And for this performance max campaign, I do not want my brand terms showing. So I actually am going to add a brand exclusion. This. Now this is a debatable thing. I actually don't care. But if a client's like dead set on not showing brand terms inside of their performance max campaign because they don't want the potential of it skewing the data too much, then we will add a brand exclusion. If they don't care and it's more like, hey, we just want to make money and if this helps with the performance max campaign, then fine, then we leave it. So there's no right or wrong in whether or not excluding brand terms or not. However, if you do exclude brand terms, you definitely need to make sure you add a standard shopping campaign. I talk about that in the course as well. You need to make sure you're capturing those brand searches then. Otherwise if you exclude it from performance max and that's the only place you have shopping ads running, then someone searching your brand name, your Google will not populate or show any shopping ads because you've excluded it from the only place you have shopping ads living. So that is why then you would have to build out that additional shopping campaign again explained in greater detail in the other modules of the course. So for here I actually am going to exclude it. So because I already have that built out. So we're going to hit next. Okay, so asset generation. This is a beta. You might see this, you might not. This is kind of using AI for Google to give you recommendations on what your ad copy should be. And so it already knows a lot about, you know, our website because we are an existing advertiser. If you're like brand new, we may not have a lot of this information, but it's pulling the stuff from our website. So here I can actually use AI and I'm going to hit generate assets and it's actually going to start populating assets for me now. Now this is pretty bad still. We actually don't sell kids furniture, so and, and chairs is not a big thing that we want. Home furniture store is way too generic and so a lot of these are like super bad. So I'm just showing you do not rely on this. But if you want sort of, yeah, this is crazy kids furniture. We, we do not sell kids furniture. We sell kid friendly furniture, but we don't sell kids kids furniture. So yeah, Google's AI is clearly still not that great. Here's a real life example of that. So I don't want that. I'm going to go ahead and remove all of this. I'll make sure to fast forward through that so you don't have to see that. Okay, so I actually went ahead and removed all of what Google put in through that asset generating AI process. None of it was that great. I went ahead and put in some headlines here. You can put up to 15, 15, I've got five that I'm adding. If you can add all 15 and it is all unique, then do it inside of the course on asset creation. You know I talk about you don't need 15, especially if you're just repeating yourself. Some people I'll see, they'll put like shop online and then shop online today. That is not going to move the needle on anything. That is just adding fluff in my opinion. So if you can't add a headline that isn't different in some way to the headlines that you have already added, then don't do it. And so to me, sometimes less can be more. But if you can add up to 15 or more than 5 actually then, then go for it. The AI will love having more to test, but only do it if you can move the needle. That's call to actions testing call to actions. That's offers and promos if you're adding that and features and benefits. So for here in this case I just have five solid headlines that I want on this one I have my final URL going back to the campaign setting piece of that final URL sort of extension or expansion. If I have that turned off then if someone clicks one of my ads, whether it's display or search, this is where they would go. Then if it's a product ad they go to the product page. Now if I have final URL turned on the final URL expansion, this is no longer the only URL they'll go to. So just remember that piece. But in the ad I have this set up as to where I want the traffic to go. I've got my long headlines, I have my descriptions. All of that is plugged in here. And again go back and look in in the course for the asset section for, for more details on optimizing assets listing group. So this is actually your product. So I actually don't want all products, right. I only in this case want sectional sofas, standard sectional sofas. So I now have my product type split out. A lot of people will forget and also they just run all products inside of an asset group that they meant to actually segment by a product type. So don't forget this piece here. And you'll actually want to double check too once you finish the campaign. Build out then images. So if you've got a lot of good creative, go ahead and add that. We. I have an asset library that I've used for this account many times. So I've got a ton of good creative. If you don't have a lot, you can actually put your website in and it will crawl your website. So let me just use the homepage here and see what it does. So this has crawled some images on our website. This isn't too bad. I'll just actually add all three of these then. Generated. This is in beta. They're actually. Yeah, it's pretty cool. These are actually AI generated images I believe. Let me go here. So I don't want to use this because we don't sell this furniture. This is not real. But this is something new that's Google's coming out where it's generating images with Google's AI. Pretty cool. I'm sure this will evolve in time, but I don't want that because this would be false advertising. I don't sell any of that AI generated furniture. So I'm going to go in and add some more images here of some of the ones that we've already had in our asset library. You know, the more the better in my opinion when it comes to images. But I get it. You may not have 20 images. So use what you can. Go to the optimization asset section of the course and I talk about everything you need to know in regards to optimizing assets. Logos. This will pull from Merchant center if you don't already have a logo. So sometimes you don't need to worry about that. I already have logo set up for this account. Business name. So this is Home Reserve. It's a furniture company. Videos. I do have videos that we have ran and tested in the past. So I'm adding those. Those are from our YouTube channel. If you do not have. So actually let me remove these. Okay, so no videos now. If you don't have a video, Google will automatically create one. In most cases you do not want that. They look horrendous. It looks like a PowerPoint from early 2000s. Stay away from that. Google will automatically create a video. So give it something. And if that means you have to go create a simple video optimization asset piece. I talk about video a lot. You don't need to go crazy with some like $10,000 video production. But you Want to give it something that way Google's not out there building AI generated videos for you that look absolutely horrendous. So in our case we have videos. So I've gone ahead and added those in. Then our extensions site link extensions, go ahead and add those that make sense. So we already have a bunch made. So I'm going to go ahead and add those call outs. You can or sorry call to action. You, you can set this to automated. A lot of people do. I don't for E commerce. A lot of times though I go and just hit shop now I don't need to let Google test different ones. I just, I want you to go shop. Go shop my furniture. So promotions, if you have a promotion you can add that here. Pricing, if you want to add pricing you can go ahead and do that here as well. This is sectional sofas. So I'm going to add my sectional sofa price extensions there calls, we actually do not want calls for this account. So I don't have that set up. And then call outs, I'm gonna add some call outs that we already have in here. So we've got 60 day no risk trial washable, 10 year warranty. Where was that? Pet friendly's huge. And then where is washable? That's always a big one. Boom. So I'm gonna hit apply structured snippets. I've got these built out too. So these are types of sectionals that we, we sell. Now in this case, because I'm only targeting sectional sofas, I could actually do some of our more popular sectional sofa brands or sorry, not brands but actual products of our sectional sofas because we have many different styles. So I could create I believe a style boom, boom, boom. But most people are shopping us wouldn't know what those styles are yet. And so I'm actually going to leave it here. We have types. So even though this is a sectional sofas asset group that I'm building, I I'm okay allowing it to show hey, we also have you know, love seats, chairs, ottomans, et cetera. So I'm gonna have that in there as well. Lead form, I do not have that. Don't need that form or E commerce location, don't need that either. Then there's some other things if you want to change the display path of what that would look like. So we could do sectional. This would be for like text ad base and stuff. Not huge. And some of these other settings aren't that important as well. Then now I'm down to my audience signal level. I talk about audience signals in its own complete section in the course. So I'm not gonna go in huge detail, but let me go ahead and add some search themes again. There's a full search theme section as well if you haven't checked that out in the course. So I'm just going to add a few here. Boom. Okay, then, audience signal. I have some saved audience signals already, so I'm going to go ahead and add that in there again. If somehow you missed the audience signal section of the course, just go back in the course and review everything there is to to know about building out audience signals, how they operate. So going to hit next budget. They're going to give you a budget recommendation, obviously set what you are comfortable with. I as, as you remember, I don't like running anything under $50 per day for this account though. You know, we have a very large budget. So I'm okay starting actually at $1,000 a day. Then it's going to review. So let's see how long Google can take on this. Sometimes it will take a little while. Okay, so the review is complete. Everything looks good. Then I'm going to hit publish campaign. All right. All the hard work's done, right? Well, no, it's not. So you need to go now into the settings of that campaign again and double check everything. So you can do that by actually hovering over the little icon near the campaign or a lot of times I like to go inside the campaign. Then I go to the settings. Now, if you remember when we were adding in locations, I said they hide a setting that's very important there that you need to go back and look at and change. That's what I'm going to go do right now. So I've added in location and now I'm going to go to campaign settings. Boom. You see this location options dropdown that you have now? They hide that during the actual campaign build out. It's hilarious. They do that again. Very sneaky and a greedy move by Google. Drop this down. Here's your target settings. You want this set to presence. This is people in or regularly in your targeted locations. If you have it set to presence or interest. What this is doing is allowing Google to show your ads to. To people that may have interest in the United States. It's. It's too loose. So when we have had this on, what we find is you'll get a lot of traffic from other countries, mainly India. India is really big on there and we don't ship furniture other than the United States. So I don't want any traffic whatsoever from anywhere in the world. So I'm actually going to just put presence people in a regular. That does. Google does a really good job of honoring that. At that point you can go crazier and actually go into your advance advanced target settings and actually you would do that one second. So I would have that saved. Make sure this is saved. Yep. You would go to your location setting here and then you would go to the exclusion. If you want to get crazy, you can actually go in and just start excluding the rest of the world. So I don't want Canada. I don't want Mexico. I have at our agency we have like a full sheet of basically every country in the world that will layer that on. You don't necessarily need to do this again. This is like an extra cautionary step to do. A lot of times Google will do a really good job of honoring that target setting that I just showed you. But if you want. If you're suspicious, go ahead and start excluding all those other countries there. Let me hop back into settings then. Okay. I just want to make sure goals are good. Purchases only. Perfect. That's all I want customer acquisitions turned off. That's what I want my feet. Merchant center feed set set up. All good. There it is. I don't have any feed. I don't want a specific feed, label or anything. So I want everything set up there. So all products from all feeds. That's perfect. Store locations. We don't have any actual physical stores. So this is nothing to me. And then campaign settings, we're good. Language is set automatically. Created assets. Remember I have this turned off right now. This is something I would go back in once this campaign is working and dialed in on my targeted goal. I could go in here then and actually turn on text assets and final URLs. But as I've mentioned, exclude URLs that you don't want Google to send traffic to. Mainly blog posts a lot of times. But you could have other article type posts on your website. Even gift card pages. I've seen gift card pages get crawled by Google and they you start seeing gift card search terms. You don't want that. So go in. Exclude any pages you wouldn't want Google to send traffic to. You don't need to worry about privacy policy pages or anything like that. Google already knows what all of that is. For the most part it's blog and informational type pages that we exclude out. Then I go to asset groups. So I just built this asset group. Right. I want to make sure that I did not accidentally put all products in here because this asset group should have named it right? Shame on me. This asset group is for sectional sofas only. We sell ottomans, we sell love seats and many other types of furniture. This is for sectional sofas only. I have seen many many times where during the build out like I just showed you, people forget to actually go in to the listing group level and segment out down to the product type that the asset group is built around. So then what happens is they end up bl all products inside of their asset group and now I'm showing ottoman product ads around sectional sofa ad creative doesn't make sense, right? So always double check this. Go to this listing group section. Boom. This is set up correctly. Everything else in all products is excluded and my standard seat sectional product category is enabled. So everything looks good. Now you know how to set up a Performance Max campaign the right way. You hear me throughout the video, talk a lot about course sections and referencing certain modules and sections of the course. That is the Performance Max course that I have built. If you don't have access to that course, I have a link in the description. Go ahead, go check it out. Money back guarantee on it. But you're going to get a complete course on Performance Max. Every single thing you need to know every setting, what Performance Max is. It's very very robust and extremely cheap and I'm offering 100% money back guarantee on it. So if you have other questions in regards to the build out Performance Max campaigns or you want to know additional information on some of the pieces or mechanics of Performance Max campaigns, I break all of that out in the course. Make sure you go check that out and I will see you on the next. Sam.