One of the most important changes in PPC is Google’s Performance Max campaigns which use automation to help marketers drive more conversions, gain more transparent insights and expand their customer reach.
What are Performance Max Campaigns?
Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. It has been designed to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels (e.g. Display, Search, YouTube, Maps), complementing your keyword-focused search campaigns through automated bidding and targeting. The automation capabilities have made it an exciting option for those wanting to enhance their search campaigns.

How Do Performance Max Campaigns Work?
Performance Max campaigns use your conversion goals, audience signals and advertising objectives to ensure your ads reach your targeted audiences at the right time. Automation is used to help improve results and grow your business across Google’s channels. It helps you achieve your goals in four main ways:
- Increase conversions and value – The use of automation optimises your budget and bids to help capture new conversion opportunities in real-time.
- Find new customers – You’ll be able to unlock new audience segments using Google’s real-time understanding of behaviour, content and user intent. This allows the most relevant ads to show at the optimal times.
- Gain richer insights – Performance Max campaigns have been added to the Insights page which helps you understand how you can improve your campaigns and how automation is working. Additionally, you can see how your top-performing assets are being combined to build creatives using the Combinations report.
- Work together with automation – You can share expertise about what audiences are most likely to convert and provide high-quality creative assets to aid automation.
Best Practices for Performance Max Conversion
In order to get the best out of your campaigns, these are the best practices for Performance Max conversion:
- Choose conversion goals important to your business and set values for your conversions – After selecting your main objectives and conversion goals, ensure that accurate conversion measurement is set up, and set conversion values to represent the relative importance of your goals.
- Choose the bid strategy that best fits your goals and set the right budget – Smart Bidding based on your goals is used by Performance Max to set the right bids in real-time to help drive better results from your budget. You can use existing campaigns in your account as a guide to set the budget for these campaigns.
- Keep Final URL expansion turned on to drive more conversions and relevant search queries – This will help find more converting search queries that are likely to perform well based on customer intent and their relevance to your landing pages.
- Create a variety of creative assets for your asset group – You should add as many different versions of text, image and video assets as possible; this is because the more assets you provide, the more ad formats the campaign can create.
- Add audience signals to indicate which audiences are more likely to convert – This is important as it helps to guide automated targeting.
- Include ad extensions – This helps your ads provide more detail to your customers and show up more prominently.
- Evaluate performance – You want to focus on relevant performance metrics that align with your bid strategy, account for conversion delays, check for campaign alerts, and compare conversion performance before and after adding Performance Max. You can also view the Insights page which will help you understand what’s driving performance.
Performance Max campaigns help drive better performance and convert more customers across all of Google’s advertising surfaces. It’s an exciting new campaign that marketers will want to implement to expand their customer research and drive more conversions.
If you would like professional assistance with your media buy campaigns, our multilingual team at GA Agency can help. We run media buy campaigns for our clients on different platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Contact us to see how we can work with you as a strategic partner.