Paid search advertising is an essential part of online marketing. But as the old adage goes — “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” — spending your entire ad budget on a single search campaign is a risky venture that might not pay off.
That’s the thinking behind Google’s Performance Max Campaigns. Introduced in November 2021, Performance Max is a goal-based campaign that allows users to tap into the power of AI and reach customers across a wide variety of platforms with a single campaign.
Why Should I Run Google Performance Max Campaigns?
Online shoppers have significantly more options today than even a few years ago. Targeting them through a traditional Google Ads campaign can be like taking a shot in the dark.
While blindfolded.
Google Performance Max Campaigns leverage artificial intelligence to provide automated targeting and delivery across all Google networks — including Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps — with one campaign. This allows you to maximize your reach by finding new customers wherever they are shopping, instead of hoping to locate them on any particular platform.
There are many benefits to this approach. Google Performance Max Campaigns provide:
Increased Visibility & Conversions
Google Max Campaigns use Google’s machine learning technology to optimize campaigns across all Google properties. With a single campaign, you can reach customers across multiple platforms. And the algorithm pulls from all your assets, including text and creative, to deliver a perfectly tailored ad at the right time and place, improving your conversion rates.
Advanced Audience Targeting
Performance Max Campaigns rely on the customer data and audience signals you provide for precision targeting of those customers that are most likely to convert. You can base campaigns around life events, affinity signals, current audience, similar audience, detailed demographics, and custom signals. This helps you find new customers through extremely relevant ads.
Improved Efficiency
The use of AI really pays off with automated ad placement and bidding. Performance Max Campaigns automatically place your creative and written assets where they will perform, and know where and when to spend money in order to maximize your impact
Creative Asset Optimization
Google Max Campaigns are designed to optimize your creative assets. The machine learning algorithm analyzes what your audience is responding to in real time and will generate the right headlines, meta descriptions, images, and videos to produce better engagement and higher conversions.
Enhanced Search Performance
Google Max Campaigns are meant to complement your existing search campaigns. As such, they allow you to “fill in the blanks,” creating search opportunities you might otherwise overlook.
Tinkering Beneath the Hood: How Performance Max Campaigns Work
While Performance Max does a lot of the work automatically, it still requires your input to work properly. You provide customer data and creative assets, choose a marketing objective, and choose one of the following conversion goals:
Online Sales Goals
These cover everything from in-store purchases to loyalty program sign-ups.
Lead Generation Goals
These include having a customer request a quote, fill out a contact form, call your company, etc.
Offline Sales Goals
Retail store visits are a great example.
Based on your input, Google takes care of the rest — automatically optimizing your ads and bids to maximize campaign performance in the most budget-friendly way as possible.
Numbers Tell the Story: Lower Costs Per Click
Google Performance Max Campaigns are still fairly new, having been around less than two years. Several Foremost Media clients have been utilizing Performance Max and, looking at the data, the benefits are clear.
When comparing Google Max to Search campaigns, Tandemloc’s cost per click (CPC) is 61% lower. For Chemtronics, the CPC is 332% lower, and for Lanair, 416% lower. Additionally, Lanair’s CPC compared to Display campaigns is 767% lower. Those are some pretty impressive statistics!
Based on this information, our key takeaway is this: Performance Max Campaigns consistently bring in a lower cost per click than the other campaigns, which means they are bringing in traffic at the cheapest cost.
If you would like more to explore how Google Performance Max Campaigns can benefit your business, reach out to us today!
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