Using ChatGPT? Chat with SmartMetrics AI about our services, marketing/analytics insights, how-to implementations & more.

Google Ads is launching fresh methods for optimizing and demonstrating the incremental value of Performance Max campaigns. The latest features enable enhancing performance on Search inventory, boosting ROI through more impactful video creative, measuring conversion uplift, and accessing more comprehensive reporting.

Boost Your Ads Performance with the Search and Performance Max

Google Ads’ AI-powered Search and Performance Max work hand in hand to maximize conversions across all of Google. By combining broad match keywords with Smart Bidding, you can supercharge your Search campaigns. Performance Max takes it a step further by driving incremental conversions across all Google advertising channels, including Search. With advanced keywordless AI technology, it analyzes your landing page content, assets, and product feed (if you have one) to identify new converting queries and generate relevant text ads that match the user’s intent. These additive search opportunities unlock additional performance on YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.

Google Ads recently introduced account-level negative keywords, allowing advertisers to exclude specific queries they don’t want their ads to appear for. This is particularly useful for maintaining brand suitability or other reasons. In the near future, campaign-level brand exclusions will also be available, giving advertisers even more control over their Performance Max campaigns. This feature will ensure that the campaigns don’t serve for branded queries that the advertiser wants to avoid on Search and Shopping inventory. Additionally, applying these exclusions will help block traffic from most brand misspellings and brand searches in a foreign language. Advertisers can exclude their brand terms and select from a list of other brands to exclude. If any brands are missing from the list, there will be an option in Google Ads to request additions.

In the coming months, Google Ads will roll out page feeds to Performance Max. This new feature will allow advertisers to direct traffic to specific landing page URLs on their website. Advertisers will also have the ability to group URLs by theme using labels, making it easier to use them in a specific campaign or asset group.

When page feeds are combined with final URL expansion turned on, the keywordless AI technology will use this collection of URLs to better understand which landing pages are most relevant to the business. This will provide advertisers with another way to inform and guide AI within the final URL expansion feature, ultimately helping to drive valuable conversions from new queries that may not have been captured by their Search campaigns.

Performance Max Now Offers Simplified Video Creation Options

Performance Max is designed to help businesses maximize conversions across all of Google’s advertising channels, not just on Search. This makes high-quality creative assets, including video, essential for Performance Max success. To streamline the video ad creation process, Google Ads has integrated video creation tools directly into Performance Max campaign setup and editing workflows. Previously, these tools were only available in the asset library. This means that even businesses with limited resources or time can now easily create high-quality video ads using Performance Max.

Prove Performance Max’s value with experiments

Two Performance Max types of experiments are now available to test its performance against other campaigns:

1) Performance Max uplift experiment to measure the incremental conversions or conversion value gained by adding a new Performance Max campaign to your existing campaign mix.

2) Performance Max vs. Standard Shopping campaign to compare results and determine whether to replace the Standard Shopping campaign.

Optimize your asset groups and budget allocation with these tips

New reporting and insights are available to help advertisers understand and evaluate their campaign results. Conversions, conversion value, cost, and other metrics can soon be seen at the asset group level, allowing advertisers to guide their creative strategy and improve their campaigns. Advertisers can also test new asset groups and add new assets within existing asset groups to drive more conversions. In addition, budget pacing insights will soon be available to automatically uncover opportunities to optimize budget and performance, with customized recommendations to maximize budget utilization. With Performance Max, advertisers can quickly adapt to fast-changing consumer trends and optimize their budget across channels in real time.