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RODNEY IP: Hi, everyone.
Hope you're all doing well today and enjoying SMX Next so far.
I'm Rodney Ip, one of the Global Front
Leads for Performance Max campaigns.
Performance Max is our newest automated campaign type
that delivers the greatest channel
coverage of any other Google Ads campaign.
I'm really, really excited to share more in this new way
to maximize performance of your Google Ads.
So today, we'll start with a quick overview
of what is Performance Max and what it aims to achieve.
Next, we have some case studies of advertisers
that are seeing success with Performance Max.
We also have some best practices to show you
how to get the most out of Performance Max campaigns.
And then we'll give you a sneak peek
of what we have planned for the upcoming months.
After all that, we'll have a live Q&A
session where I'll answer any questions you might have.
To kick us off, what is Performance Max?
It's a new goal-based campaign that
aims to increase online sales, generate more leads,
and drive more store visits to physical business locations.
It's designed to run alongside keyword-based search
campaigns, as well as your awareness and consideration
campaigns, so you can easily drive more conversions
across a full range of Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail,
and Discover feed formats, all from a single campaign.
Performance Max puts your business goals
front and center and prioritizes these above other signals.
By inputting your specific conversion goals,
users help Performance Max understand what conversions
matter most to your business.
Thanks to this focus on goals, Performance Max campaigns
will leverage automated bidding and targeting technology,
data-driven attribution, and automatically tailored ads
to help you find more customers, wherever they are
across Google Ads' inventory.
Automation can help you invest your budget more effectively
and dynamically allocate spend where the highest ROI
opportunities are.
To explain how this works, an analogy
we often use to explain the benefits
of cross-channel automation is comparing
fishing in multiple ponds to fishing in the ocean.
With single-channel campaigns, much
like fishing in multiple ponds, you may catch big fish,
but it's hard to see whether there
are bigger fish in other ponds that you might be missing.
It's also hard to know where to best spend your time
and resources if you're fishing in multiple ponds
at the same time.
With cross-channel optimization in Performance Max,
it's a lot more like fishing in the ocean.
With all of Google Ads' inventory combined,
you can use automation in Performance Max
to cast a wider net in one body of water,
where you can easily catch all of the biggest fish.
Use Performance Max to find new customers
wherever they are and simplify your campaign management.
This way, you can run fewer campaigns
but still maximize the performance
across all of your Google Ads.
At the same time, Performance Max automation
relies on you to provide it with the right ingredients
for success.
For example, a feature called Conversion Value Rules
allows you to indicate which conversions
are worth the most to your business
based on characteristics like audience, location, and device.
Performance Max also includes a new feature
called Audience Signals, where you can steer automation
by giving it information on which audience segments are
most likely to convert.
We've also heard your feedback that you
need more transparency into how Google Ads automation is
working.
You can see what type of audiences, creative,
and other drivers impact performance the most
with our new Insights page.
You can also get new Consumer Insights
that you can apply to your broader business or marketing
strategy--
for example, identifying rising search trends or a shift
in new converting audiences.
If you've already heard or read about some of this
before, you might be wondering, how is Performance Max actually
doing?
We have a couple of great stories
from brands that were early adopters during the beta.
Let's start with Automox.
It's a B2B technology company from the US
that offers a cloud-native platform for centralizing IT
operations.
Demand for these solutions is higher than ever,
fueled by more remote work and hybrid work.
Automox started using Performance Max
with the goal of increasing lead volume by scaling across all
of Google's channels.
The result-- they saw a 10% increase in conversions,
two times higher conversion rate,
and seven times lower CPL compared to their account
average.
Another customer over in France, MACIF,
is a leading insurance company.
COVID-19 impacted its ability to manage customer demand
through brick-and-mortar agencies.
As a result, MACIF had high hopes for digital marketing
to drive a boost in health insurance subscriptions.
Historically, the team focused on paid search,
but wanted to branch out, using Performance Max
campaigns to complement their existing campaigns.
By taking advantage of automation and machine
learning, MACIF saved time in terms of campaign management,
while improving results across leads, calls, and store visits.
They saw a huge 43% increase in conversions
without cannibalizing any other performance
from other campaigns.
And they decreased the cost-per-conversion by 53%.
MACIF is now planning to expand Performance Max
to other insurance services.
So how do you set up Performance Max to get the best results?
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind.
First, pick conversion goals that matter to your business.
For example, if lead forms, phone calls, and store
visits all contribute to your sales,
make sure Performance Max campaign
is targeting and optimizing towards these specific goals.
This results in being able to maximize your marketing
outcomes.
Next, set values to represent the relative importance
of different conversion goals.
This helps Performance Max automation understand
and prioritize the conversions that
are most important for your business.
For [INAUDIBLE] advertisers, you can also
pair Performance Max with offline conversion imports.
Providing this data about which leads actually result in sales
will help Performance Max drive higher lead quality
across channels.
Performance Max has another interesting feature
called Final URL Expansion.
We recommend that you leave this on
to maximize your query coverage on Search.
This feature allows Performance Max to use relevant landing
pages on your website to show up on additional searches that
have a strong likelihood of converting.
It also dynamically customizes your ad headlines
to match the customer's intent.
So if you're already seeing good results for your business
from automation, you'll be very interested in this feature.
Creative assets are another critical component
of Performance Max campaigns.
You want to upload a variety of assets
across images, text, and video.
This helps make sure you're showing up
on the full range of inventory and formats possible.
If you don't have a video, Performance Max
has you covered.
We will use other assets to auto-generate
a high-quality video for you.
When it comes to audience signals,
we strongly recommend that you indicate the audience segments
that are most relevant for your business
and that have the highest likelihood of conversions.
Automation will help you use your insights
to help maximize results.
It builds on the signals you provide
to help you find new incremental customers you may not
have known about or expected.
Some of the most helpful audience signals to add
are from your data and customer segments.
Finally, as per other Google Ads campaigns,
include extensions to make your ads more prominent
and to provide more helpful details to your customers,
such as locations, other website links, or a phone number
to call you.
For more in-depth best practices,
feel free to check out our new Best Practices Guide and video
on the Google Ads Help Center.
We're so excited that we've hit this milestone of launching
Performance Max to all advertisers.
We'll continue investing in it and building new features
to make it even easier to understand and manage
your campaign to drive better results.
Here's a sneak peek of the upcoming
roadmap for Performance Max.
For starters, we'll be releasing new suggestions
in the Recommendations tab so you'll
get new ideas on how to continuously improve
your performance from Performance Max.
We'll also be launching experiments
that allow you to do A/B testing to measure
the incremental impact of adding Performance Max
to your current campaign mix.
Finally, we're adding new goals, such as the ability
to exclusively optimize your campaign
to find new customers who haven't interacted
with your website or ads before.
Moving forward, we'll continue to grow and improve performance
in three core areas.
The first is continue to add new ad inventory and formats
so you can reach more converting customers.
Second, we'll add deeper ways for you
to express your goals and the unique expertise
you have about your business so that you can help
automation work better for you.
And third, you'll see new types of insights and explanations
to make it easier to understand automation and the performance
that it's driving.
Thank you so much, everyone, for joining me today.
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