Google is introducing a few new ways to optimize and prove the gradual value of your Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. These features include enhancing performance on Search inventory, increasing return on investment with more impactful video creative, measuring conversion uplift, and providing more comprehensive reporting. These updates will help advertisers guide their Performance Max campaigns in the right direction and improve their marketing goals.
Four New Performance Max Campaign Features
1. Campaign-Level Brand Exclusions
The first update that’s coming is one we are very excited about and can’t come soon enough: Campaign-level brand exclusions. Campaign-level brand exclusions will provide additional control over Performance Max campaigns and means that businesses can prevent their ads from appearing for branded queries for Search and Shopping results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That’s been a big concern with PMax campaigns – that they cannibalize the existing search campaigns. The brand exclusions will also help block traffic from misspellings and searches in different languages. Businesses can exclude their own branded terms and competitor-branded terms as well. If any brands are missing from the list, you can request additions through Google Ads.
2. New Video Creation Tool
Google is introducing a video creation tool that will help you create high-quality videos through an array of templates while in PMax campaign creation. While this option has been available in the Asset Library, this feature will be directly integrated into the Performance Max campaign set up to make the process as seamless as possible. While videos you create yourself are the best option, videos you create using the video creation tool will be better than Google automatically creating videos from your PMax assets, which is what happens when you don’t include videos at all.
3. Ability to Run A/B Tests
Another great feature being rolled out by Google is that they are allowing experiments to run on Performance Max campaigns. We will now be allowed to run A/B tests to compare the performance of PMax campaigns to other campaigns in your account. The two types of experiments that you are able to run are the Performance Max uplift experiment and the Performance Max vs. Standard Shopping campaign.
- The Performance Max uplift experiment will show how adding a PMax campaign to your current efforts will drive increased conversions or conversion value.
- The Performance Max vs. Standard Shopping campaign will allow you to compare an existing Standard Shopping campaign to a Performance Max campaign targeting the same products.
These experiments will assess the potential impact of your results, and determine if you should replace your Standard Shopping campaign.
4. New PMax Campaign Reporting & Insights
The last feature allows you to push into opportunities to enhance your asset groups and budget distribution. Building off of all these new ways to improve your PMax campaigns, Google is pushing out new reporting and insights that will help advertisers view their results. Advertisers will be able to see conversions, conversion value, cost, and more at the asset group level, which is also something we’ve been wanting since PMax campaigns came out (no more creating separate PMax campaigns, just so you can see how separate segments are doing!). This will allow advertisers to pivot on asset groups that are not working well and test into new ones to see how they impact performance.
Google Ads will also introduce budget pacing insights to enable advertisers to optimize their budget and performance, helping advertisers decide when to increase campaign budgets or move spending elsewhere. Furthermore, customized recommendations will be available to help businesses maximize their budget utilization.
Google’s Performance Max campaigns still have a lot of growing to do, but by combining Google’s AI and our advertising expertise, we can help push that process along. The rollout of these new PMax campaign features will help advertisers take strides in the right direction to achieving their marketing goals at the most efficient rate possible. Look out for Google’s new Performance Max campaign changes coming soon, and be prepared to act on them right away.
