The first step is to select your main campaign objective
and the conversion goals you want to drive performance towards.
The goals selected here will be the primary optimization target for your Performance Max campaign.
If you want to prioritize certain goals over others,
you can set or adjust your conversion values later to reflect the relevant importance of each goal.
Once you’ve set up your conversion goals, select Performance Max as your campaign type
to access all Google Ads channels and inventory from a single campaign.
Next, select a budget and bid strategy for your campaign.
Make sure that your bid strategy also aligns with your business objectives.
For example, if you are focused on maximizing conversion value
and different types of conversions generate different values for your business,
choose “Conversion value”.
If you are focused on maximizing conversions,
choose “Conversions” from the dropdown menu.
This is a good bid strategy to use if all conversions are worth the same to your business.
Soon, budget and target forecasts will become available to help guide you in your decision.
You can also add a cost-per-action (CPA)
or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) target to your bid strategy.
Not sure where to start?
A helpful reference point is your average CPA or ROAS
from the last 30 days on comparable campaigns
that are optimizing towards the same conversion goals.
The campaign may also auto-suggest a CPA or ROAS target
based on your historical account performance.
You can use this or edit the number as needed.
After you set your bid strategy and targets,
you’ll choose your campaign’s location and language settings.
You can also adjust other settings like your ad serving schedule, or start and end date.
Tracking template and final URL suffix settings are also available here.
We recommend that you leave final URL expansion "On"
to drive maximum coverage on relevant search queries.
Performance Max should always be run together with your core, keyword-based Search campaigns.
Still, the final URL expansion feature
helps you show up on additional searches that have a strong likelihood of leading to conversions.
It uses landing page content across your website
to dynamically customize headlines for your ads.
You can choose to exclude certain landing pages from your website as needed,
like your company blog or FAQ pages.
Final URL expansion helps you find new, converting search queries
that aren’t already covered by your keyword-based Search campaigns
or where your Performance Max campaign has a higher Ad Rank.
It then matches these new queries to relevant landing pages on your website.
In addition, account level negative keywords
allow you to exclude certain keywords from your Performance Max campaigns.
The quality and variety of the creative assets you provide
plays an important role in your campaign’s success.
Asset groups let you manage different kinds of creative assets,
and are similar to “ad groups” in other campaigns.
Your assets include: The final URL or landing page that you’d like to send customers to,
images, logos, videos, text headlines and descriptions, and a call-to-action.
Create an asset group with creative assets that are related to a single theme.
You can create multiple asset groups per campaign.
Performance Max automatically assembles assets into all the available ad formats
that are relevant to your conversion goals.
When you provide more assets, this helps the campaign build a wider range of ad formats
and show more compelling creative to users.
This also allows you to appear on more inventory to drive more conversions or value.
For images, you can upload them from your computer,
load previously used assets from your account, or pull in assets from your website.
Videos can be uploaded from YouTube.
If you don’t have a video available,
Performance Max will automatically create a high-quality video for you, using your assets.
Check the Ad strength indicator to see how you may need to improve your assets.
You want to provide as many assets as possible,
since automation and machine learning perform better
when they have a variety of high-quality assets to work with
to find the most relevant combinations.
If you have unique insights about which segments of users are more likely to convert
or which ads you think will resonate better with a particular audience,
you can use the new audience signals feature to let Google know.
A major benefit of automation is its ability to help you unlock new converting audience segments,
even ones you might not have expected or known about before.
Performance Max campaigns help you find new, valuable customers
and don't limit your ads to a specific or selected set of audiences.
However, you can use audience signals to help point the system in the right direction.
We strongly recommend that you input audience signals to guide automated targeting
and ensure the most relevant ad is served to the most relevant audience.
They provide important information to help machine learning ramp up
and accelerate the ability to optimize your campaign.
Custom segments and your data, which includes customer match and website visitors lists,
are the most helpful audience information to provide
since they provide a strong signal about which audiences have a higher chance of converting.
After adding audience signals, you’ll want to include ad extensions.
Use a variety of extensions for sitelinks, callouts, calls, lead forms and more.
These help your ads show up more prominently
and also provide consumers with more helpful details about your business,
including different ways they can contact you.
After you add extensions, you’re nearly done creating your campaign!
Check the summary page before you publish the campaign
to see if anything’s missing or if you have any errors to resolve.