Since the time Google launched Performance Max campaigns, they have been a go-to solution for many advertisers. These campaigns are powered by Google AI and help maximize ad performance from different Google channels. For this reason, PMax campaigns often deliver significantly better results than many other Google Ads campaign types.
In fact, many brands using Performance Max campaigns have seen impressive results. Some have even reported revenue growth of 78% after running PMax campaigns continuously for several months. This highlights how effective these AI-powered campaigns can be when used properly.
However, to get the most out of your PMax campaigns, it’s important to set them up properly and avoid common Google Ads errors that can impact performance. Ensuring the right configuration helps prevent issues that may limit visibility, inflate costs, or weaken overall results.
In this blog, we will learn how to set up Performance Max campaigns. From the initial stages, where you need to choose a campaign objective, to setting up asset groups, we will discuss all the steps comprehensively.
Are you ready? Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Understanding Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max campaigns are automated by Google AI. With these campaigns, you can reach users across all Google Ads channels, such as Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps with just a single campaign.
Moreover, Google has designed PMax campaigns in a way that they can complement your Search campaigns and help you find and reach more converting customers from all possible Google channels.
For these campaigns, Google AI handles bidding, placements, budget optimization, creative combinations, and other important settings to a large extent. But while automation plays a huge role in setting up your campaigns, you must note that by adding signals such as search themes and audience signals, you can guide Google AI to optimize your ads and their delivery.
How to Set Up Performance Max Campaigns?
Let’s quickly understand how to create a Performance Max campaign.
Prerequisites
Before you create a Performance Max campaign:
- You should link all business-related accounts, such as your YouTube channel, Google Business Profile, etc., to Google Ads. That will help Google find more opportunities to reach your audience and promote your business.
- Set up conversion tracking for important events such as sales, purchases, etc. That will help Google AI learn what drives the most value for you, and it will adjust your campaign’s bids and budget accordingly.
- You should also keep your Remarketing lists ready so that you can use them in your PMax campaigns. These lists are prepared based on your website or app visitors, which pages users have visited, and other factors. Remarketing lists ensure optimal coverage for your ads. And for these lists, Google recommends that you should at least have more than 100 active users in the past 30 days, and a minimum of 1 new user in the last 2 days.
- (Optional) If you intend to promote products via PMax campaigns, then you should ensure your GMC account is connected to Google Ads. Moreover, your product feed should also be uploaded to your Merchant Center account and approved.
Step-by-Step Process to Create a Performance Max Campaign
Let’s now deep dive into how to set up a Performance Max campaign in detail:
Create a New Campaign
- Go to the campaign menu and click on Campaigns.
- Click on the ‘+’ button. Select ‘New Campaign.’
Choose Your Advertising Objective
Next up, you will have to select a campaign objective for your PMax campaign. You can select from this list:
- Sales
- Leads
- Website traffic
- Local store visits and promotions
- Create a campaign without guidance
| Note: You cannot create PMax campaigns for ‘App promotion’ and ‘Awareness and consideration’ objectives. |
The objective that you select in this stage should align with what you wish to achieve from this campaign. For example, do you want to drive more users to your online store? Then selecting website traffic will make sense.
In case you want to promote offline sales, then you should go ahead and choose store goals for your PMax. If you don’t have any objective decided, then Google also gives you the option to create a PMax campaign without guidance.
Once you select your preferred campaign objective, you can proceed with the setup. Google Ads will then show you the most relevant features and settings that will help you achieve your business goals for that selected campaign objective.
Selecting Conversion Goals
Next, you must select from existing or add new conversion goals for your PMax campaign. These goals are groups of conversion actions that help Google Ads understand which types of business results matter the most to you.
| Note: You can add or review conversion goals only when your campaign objectives are “Sales,” “Leads,” “Website traffic,” “Local store visits,” or “Custom.” |
The goals you select or add will ensure that Google AI uses your conversions for bidding and overall improvements of your PMax campaign.
Select a Campaign Type
Next up, you will have to select your campaign type.
Obviously, for our campaign, we will be choosing Performance Max.
Once we select PMax as the campaign type, in the next step, there will be an option to choose whether you wish to advertise products from your Merchant Center account.
If your primary aim is to increase your e-commerce sales, then it’s recommended that you enable this setting and also select your connected Merchant Center account. Using your product data feed from GMC, Google will be able to create product-based ads (such as Shopping ads) that will appear across eligible channels and help promote your inventory.
Once done, you can name your campaign and click on Continue.
Configure Bidding Preferences
Then you will have to select your campaign’s bidding strategy.
| Note: PMax only supports Smart bidding, and you can’t choose manual CPC. |
The two bidding strategies you can choose from will be:
- Conversions: In this strategy, Google will automatically try to optimize bids and get as many conversions as possible within your budget. For this bidding strategy, Google allows you to set a target CPA (Cost Per Action).
- Conversion Value: As the name suggests, this strategy will focus on getting the highest total conversion value (e.g., revenue) within your budget. If you have specific profitability goals, then for this bidding strategy you can also set a target RoAS (Return on Ad Spend).
| Pro tip: We recommend you to check this Google page which has some valuable tips that will help you decide whether you should choose ‘Conversions’ or ‘Conversions Value’. |
Additionally, for customer acquisition, Google allows you to adjust your bidding in order to acquire new customers.
You can either:
- Bid higher for new customers
- Or only bid for new customers, regardless of the bidding strategy you chose earlier
We will select ‘Conversions’, and also bid higher for new customers. And then press ‘Next’.
Set up Campaign Settings
In this section, you will have to define some important settings of your campaign.
- Start by selecting locations. Through this setting, you can reach out to users who are either located in or have shown interest for a geographic location.
2. Then comes language targeting. By selecting certain languages, you are informing Google about the language of your potential customers you’re interested in targeting.
3. Then you will have some more settings to configure. These include:
- Ad schedule: You can decide the number of days and hours your ad will be shown to users.
- Start and end dates: Select the starting and ending dates of your PMax campaign
- Campaign URL options: Here you can add a tracking template, final URL suffix, or even custom parameters. These will help you with better performance tracking.
- Devices: Google allows you to select the types of devices where your ads can appear. For example, computers, tablets, etc.
- Brand Exclusions: With this, you can prevent your campaigns from serving those branded terms that you wish to avoid.
| Note: In PMax campaigns, brand exclusions only apply to Search and Shopping inventory. However, you can allow your Shopping ads to still appear in searches that mention excluded brands. |
- Age Exclusions: Allows you to prevent your ad from showing to certain age groups.
Once you have configured these settings, click on Next.
Set Up Asset Groups and Assets
After you configure campaign settings, you will come to the asset generation stage. Here, Google AI can automatically generate assets for you based on your final URL, the products or services you want to advertise in the campaign, and some other details.
But please note that you can skip this process and manually create assets for your PMax campaigns by clicking on ‘Skip.’
Then, you will come to the stage where you need to create your Asset group.
Asset groups include but aren’t limited to:
- Images
- Videos
- Logos
- Headlines
- Descriptions
- Location Assets
- Page Feeds
- Other assets such as callouts, sitelinks, etc.
- Automatically created assets, such as Final URL expansion, etc.
However, when you are creating and uploading PMax assets in Google Ads, you must ensure that you are carefully following asset requirements laid down by Google for PMax campaigns.
For example, headlines (which fall under text assets) that you create for your PMax campaign should be within the character limit of 30. Moreover, you need to add at least three headlines, and at most you can add fifteen. And in the case of video assets, you can either upload videos on your own or use videos that are created by Google AI using the assets you provided. If you upload your own videos, they should be in high definition (HD) and MPG formats.
Thus, ensure that you follow these requirements and best practices for uploading and creating your PMax assets. This will help Google utilize your assets, combine them, and serve highly engaging ads across all eligible channels, which will maximize the performance and reach of your PMax campaigns!
| Pro tip: 1. We recommend that you read our blog on PMax ad specs to learn about these asset requirements and guidelines in detail. 2. Use the Ad Strength indicator to identify and understand how well your assets and ad copies are following Google’s best practices for excellent ad performance. |
Moreover, when you are creating your asset group, you can also configure asset optimization settings. Basically, you can allow Google to enhance or automatically generate assets (such as Final URL expansion) using the inputs you have already provided.
Note: If you wish to create a feed-only PMax campaign, then you must not add any of the assets (be it text, image, or video) we mentioned above. That’s because feed-only campaigns will only use your product data from Merchant Center. Moreover, you should also turn off automatically created assets such as Final URL Expansion.
Add Signals
After you upload your assets, you can scroll down to the Signals section, where you will have to add signals to your PMax campaigns.
Through signals, you are basically guiding Google AI to understand which type of users you want to reach with your ads.
Currently, the two different types of signals you can add include:
- Search Themes: Basically, PMax search themes are useful for indicating the words or phrases that your potential customers use to find your business online.
Currently, Google allows you to add 25 Search themes per asset group.
- Audience Signals: Audience signals are suggestions you can give to help Google’s AI target the right people and improve your campaign results. These signals make campaign optimization more effective.
| Note: Even if you use audience signals, Performance Max might still show ads to other people who are likely to convert and help you reach your goals. |
Configure Your Budget
Lastly, you will have to set a budget for your PMax campaign. This will help you determine the monthly charging limit of your campaign. Basically, this monthly charging limit is your average daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month.
As Google says, your ad spend can vary on each day depending on the traffic it gets. But you will never pay more than your monthly charging limit.
You can either use Google’s recommended budget, based on your campaign settings and similar advertisers, or set a custom budget. For best results, it’s advised to set a daily budget that’s at least three times your target CPA.
Review Campaign Summary and Publish
With all settings configured, you can finally review the summary of your campaign and make any last-minute adjustments.
As a pro tip, we advise all advertisers to consider the recommendations that Google makes at this stage regarding campaign enhancements.
For example, for our PMax campaign, Google recommends that we add at least four sitelinks.
Once you have reviewed all campaign settings, you can publish your PMax campaign.
Monitoring Performance After Publishing
Once your campaign is published and has run for some days, you must start monitoring and analyzing its performance.
For PMax campaigns, Google provides different types of reports, which include:
- Asset group reports can help you understand how different assets of your PMax campaigns are performing.
- Placement reports, which can help you analyze where your ads are appearing, and in case you need to exclude any PMax placement that isn’t yielding profitable results.
- Auction Insights report, which showcases how the performance of your PMax campaigns compares to other advertisers and their campaigns entering the same auctions.
| Note: The list of reports shared above for PMax campaigns isn’t exhaustive. For a detailed understanding of the different types of PMax reports you can access, what metrics those reports offer, and how to access them, read our blog on Performance Max reporting. |
Use these reports to get an overview of what’s working for your campaigns and what’s not. Using the insights, optimize your PMax campaigns in order to get even better results.
For example, with the search terms report, you can get insights related to the search terms for which your ads appeared. And if there are any terms for which you don’t want your brand (and your ads) to appear, you can add those as negative keywords to your PMax campaign.
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Conclusion
We hope that the campaign creation process explained above helped you. By now, you should not be left wondering, ‘How to set up Performance Max campaigns?’
When you follow all the steps shared above in the blog properly, it’s easy to create a well-optimized PMax campaign that helps you meet your campaign goals.
Good luck!
FAQs
- How do I optimize my Performance Max campaign?
Google AI automatically optimizes your campaigns while they are running. But beyond that, if you want to make manual contributions, you can update your assets (such as images, videos, etc.), refine audience signals, and also keep using PMax reports to track the performance of your campaign and its encompassing elements and make adjustments.
- What are the best practices for creating PMax campaigns?
Best practices will include setting up conversion tracking, adding high-quality signals, and following Google’s asset requirements, among other points.
- How long does it take for PMax campaigns to start performing?
As per Google, it can take 1-2 weeks for its systems to ramp up your campaign’s performance in order to meet your objectives.
- Can I run a Performance Max campaign without linking a Merchant Center account?
Yes, you can. However, if you’re running e-commerce campaigns with product feeds, linking your Merchant Center account is necessary to show Shopping ads.
- How should I set up conversion tracking for PMax campaigns?
First, create a conversion action in your Google Ads account, such as purchases or sign-ups. Then, install the Google tag on all website pages. You can do this manually or through Google Tag Manager. Make sure the tag is placed correctly so it can capture the data.
Next, check if the tag is firing and linked to your conversion action. This helps ensure proper tracking. If you’re using URL-based conversions, no event tag is needed. But if you want to track clicks or custom actions, use event snippets in Google Tag Manager. Finally, use Google Tag Assistant to confirm that tracking is working as expected.
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