How To Set Up A PERFORMANCE MAX Google Ads Campaign

in this video i'm going to show how to set up google ads performance max campaigns the right way since performance max was released it's been a lot of excitement about it in the google ads community and understandably so so in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to set it up quickly and easily then i'm going to talk about the pros and cons and whether you actually want to use performance max or not so let's start by covering what exactly performance max is it's a new campaign type and i've got google's announcement article

up about it because i wanted to be able to show you this graphics i think this is quite interesting and basically the idea behind performance max is it's one campaign type that allows you to simultaneously advertise across lots of different networks from youtube display search gmail etc all sorts of different places across google and the idea behind performance max is that you're going to give google a lot of information about your business and then you're basically just going to say to google you go ahead and work it out work out the best places to advertise

the best people to advertise to the best combinations and get me the results that i'm looking for that's what performance max is at the end of the day and you can see why that's been very attractive to a lot of google advertisers so let's go ahead and go through the setup process here we go so i'm in a google ads account you want to start by clicking on the new campaign and then new campaign button and then we need to select our campaign objective now you can't use performance max as a campaign type for all

campaign objectives but you can for both sales and leads which is the most common google ad campaign objectives i'm going to go ahead and use leads for the purposes of this video now this section is very very important your conversion goals whatever you enter in down here is going to be what google will optimize for so if for example we didn't want google to optimize for calls from ads then we would need to make sure that we go ahead and delete that out that would be very important so just make sure that whatever you've got

in here as your conversion goals is what you actually want what you want google to go out and get you and also it's a good idea to have values associated with these conversion goals and because one of the optimizations that we can use with performance max campaigns i'll talk about in a minute is to get google to optimize for conversion value in other words go after the conversions that are worth more to your business okay very very important so make sure you've got it set up we've got errors here and this isn't set up probably

because this is now a demonstration um ad account but hopefully you already know how to do this if not check things out on youtube you can work out set up your conversion goals and lots of stuff i will be publishing videos on that soon so make sure you subscribe for that if you haven't already so i'm gonna go ahead and click continue for demonstration purposes and then of course we get to our campaign type and as this video is all about performance maps that's what we're going to go ahead and select interesting they've got it

in as second at the moment behind search in terms of the order leeds performance max 3 sure we've created other examples in the past so let's go with that that's absolutely fine and then we get into budget and bidding now in terms of budget i recommend that with all google ad campaigns you start with something that's very affordable for you and then you scale from there once you know that you can get results so what that is for your business is going to be completely depend right for some businesses that's thousands every day for some

it's a tiny tiny fraction of that i might you know we might start with something like 20 pound a day something like that as a test case then we get into the bidding section now i've already talked about this a second ago but you can either optimize for conversion so get me as many conversions as possible or we can optimize for conversion value now if you have conversions on your website that differ in value significantly let's say for example you had um people that could opt in and inquire about your service like a full lead

and you also have like an email opt-in someone who just signs up for a you know a free report for example well those two conversions have very different values and you want google to optimize more for the people that are going to become leads in which case optimizing for conversion value makes a lot more sense if you've just got the one conversion or they're all worth the same to you you can go with conversions but i think i think most businesses conversion value is going to be the better option you can also choose to set

a target return on ad spend if you want and we typically wouldn't do this if it's a new campaign new ad account because we probably don't know what we're likely to get in terms of a a roast number um but you can if you want to go ahead and add that i'm just going to go ahead and click next and carry on now we get into location targeting now i've recorded the whole video about location targeting specifically a link will be in the video description below so go ahead and check that out if you want

more information on what to do is the best option here i'm just going to go ahead and select united kingdom for now languages we will leave as english final url expansion i'm definitely going to talk about that's a very very interesting setting but i'm also going to quickly click into more settings to cover some other stuff so we can set an ad schedule if you want if you only want your ads to run certain times of the day like just during working hours or only during weekends depending on what you sell it's absolutely fine we

can send start and end date as well but this up here final url expansion is a very very interesting feature now what this is the default is to have this turned on and what this allows google to do is send people to other pages on your website now we're still going to give them a page as a default but with this setting turned on google could test all sorts of other different pages on your website send people to your product page as opposed to your home page or vice versa send them to your case studies

page or your testimonial page instead of a specific product page as an example um this is a really interesting option now if you don't want to do this tool you can turn it off only send people to the traffic to the urls that you provided you can see that for better conversions google recommends keeping it on and so do what i recommend keeping it on the whole point of performance max is to basically say google go out and find me the best options if that means sending people to different pages to my website that i

wouldn't have thought to test great go ahead and test that for me now you can have a little bit of a halfway house where you can just exclude certain urls so let's say you're happy for google to send people to lots of different pages to work that out but not these few because that doesn't really make any sense or you can go ahead and pop those in there um and kind of maybe get the best of both worlds but that's obviously up to you okay let's go ahead and click next then we get into the

asset group now asset groups are a different thing to other campaign types obviously and what we want what i want you to do with an asset group is think about it as like an ad unit so if you think about a responsive search ad as an ad unit on the search network so it's not just one ad it's an ad unit because you have lots of different headlines and descriptions and different things can be presented to different people an asset group is that but just you know beefed up to some extent so because an asset

group is an ad unit but it's an ad unit that needs to be capable of being displayed across all those different networks you know youtube search gmail etc and there's lots of information that we can add into lots of details that we can give to google as we're going through this process we can see on the right hand side the previews and that's really helpful so we can see for example what's our ad going to look like in youtube what's it going to look like in gmail what's it going to look like in search and

display and all that sort of stuff okay so the first thing to do is add in our final url so i'm just going to pop in my website to make sure we don't have errors as we go through this process we can see it says url expansion is on so this we're saying to google this is where i want you to send people but because we've got url expansion on if you find if you think there are better places to send people go ahead and test away then as we scroll down we get into the

add creative section so first thing is we can add up to 20 different images 20 20 and if we hover over you can see that google recommends that we upload images in different sizes different formats because there's going to be lots of different types of ads across all these different networks shown and some of those are going to be different formats they're going to want images that are square or landscape or portraits so if you can go ahead and add in images that are landscaped that are square that are portrait that's ideal that's exactly what

we want to go ahead um and do here you can add up to 20 and i'd recommend that you do so the whole point of this is to give google as much sort of ammo as possible to test different stuff so go ahead and um and put those in as many as you can in terms of what images to use for some businesses it can be quite obvious so if you're a product-based business then you're going to want to put in images of your products if you're a service-based business perhaps you've got images from your

portfolio or images that show your company or the people that work for you or um you know the service being actually done all sorts of different things i'm going to create a separate video specifically on images in google ads so if you're interested make sure you subscribe and keep an eye out for that then we get into logos and again if i hover over a similar thing where we can add in square logos or landscape logos as recommended sizes and that and that's great to have different options for the same reason as with the images

right different logos are going to be displayed in different locations you can add up to five you don't need 20 of course how many would you need with a logo but with five you could have a black and white version for example you could have maybe you've got an inverted colors version and you can obviously have different sizes as well so adding in logos there then we get into videos now if you've got videos created so you've got product demonstration videos or maybe drone footage over you know the roof that you just cleaned or um

you know whatever happens to be client testimonial videos all the sort of typical marketing videos that you would you would be familiar with if you've got that sort of stuff then absolutely go ahead and put that in here if you don't that's also fine because google will automatically create videos for you now how are they going to do that they're going to take things like your images and your logos some of the copy from your website maybe some of the stuff from your headlines and they're going to sort of mash it together and create sort

of animated slideshow type short little videos which is the sort of thing that we see all the time they look pretty good and they can convert well so if you can add in go ahead and add but don't feel like you have to okay then we get into the headlines section so because these ads are going to be displayed in lots of different locations there's different types of headlines so we've got our sort of traditional search headlines 30 characters sort of thing you're familiar with we can add up to five options definitely go ahead and

add those in we've also got long headline options up to 90 characters and again you can add five options so i've got a whole video about headlines link will be included in the video description below you can check that out shows you exactly what to include all that sort of stuff would recommend you go through make sure you add in your long headlines and your standard headlines then we get into descriptions so again there's two different types you can add in one short description which is 60 characters long and then up to four other longer

descriptions and of course the same sort of stuff applies to headlines where you want to be benefit rich and talk about the plus points of your product or service and all that sort of stuff that i cover on that video that i mentioned linked to in the video description below then we've got business name obviously that's fairly self-explanatory and then we get into call to action now we can see that the default here is automated the call to action is what you'd expect right it's kind of like a it's going to look different in different

places but if you think about more of a social media type ad like a facebook ad where you've got a button where people can click on apply now sign up and they can actually go through now using automated is a good idea firstly because it allows google to test all the options and come up with the best one for you but secondly because if you've got um as we have here if i scroll up your url expansion turned on then we want to make sure that google uses the most appropriate call to action for that

page if google's deciding to send people through to a page where people can sign up for you know a free consultation on our website then they want you to sign up but if google's sending people to a page like a case studies page or the home page on our website instead then perhaps learn more is a lot more appropriate so so automated is usually the way to go here okay so go ahead and add in all those details i've got videos on the individual components of this so go ahead and add those in and then

we need to move on to audience signal this is a really important component of a performance max campaign it's actually optional but i'd certainly recommend you go ahead and add it in now as we've discussed with performance max campaigns they are great in terms of the amount of reach and the amount of options that they have but that does mean that initially google might be a bit confused over who exactly to put your ads in front of and with an audience signal you can say to google this type of person here's some signal some examples

some direction in terms of who's target and it can help you save quite a lot of budget especially at the beginning with a performance max campaign where google's just doing lots of testing and trying to work out who is the best people to advertise to so very very important so if we go ahead and click on add an audience signal and i'm going to go ahead and add a new audience there's previous examples that i've added before but we can ignore those so if we call this um example audience signal and then we've got a

number of different options so firstly we've got custom segment if i go ahead and click in here and then go on and create new segments so example custom segment okay and then we can add in some terms that are closely related to the products and services that we sell that if people have been searching for these hopefully recently not necessarily all the time um then they are the sort of people that we want to target so for example let's say we are advertising a window cleaning business we offer window cleaning services or we can come

in here and we could add in as an example window cleaning as a search term click enter and then this is a signal to google anyone that's been searching for window cleaning that's the sort of person we want to advertise to and we can add in a few different options i think don't go overboard here two or three options is great you don't want to use too many this is a an indication and a signal and you want to be quite specific to what it is that you offer so windy cleaning is a great example

so i'm going to go ahead and click save then we get into the your data section so this is basically warm audiences people that have already interacted with your business before and if i click in here for example we can add in all visitors or website visitors and that's great you definitely want to add that in also if you've got any audiences uploaded to google ad account like an email list or previous customers definitely go ahead and add those in um as well the more info you can put in here the better for google because

of course the people that have visited our website or become a customer of ours those are fantastic people to use as as a source audience for this audience signal to be like i want to have i want you to advertise people just like them okay so let's we'll add that in for now then we get into interest and detailed demographics now this is different to custom segments in that um in this section we're talking about the type of people we want to advertise to as opposed to their activity here it's like someone who has searched

for window cleaning whereas down here we want people that have that are in specific groupings basically that are in certain categories that perhaps have certain life events going on so for example with something like window cleaning we would perhaps want to just focus on people that are homeowners right people who actually own homes are likely to be our best option when it comes to people interested in winter cleaning renters and stuff less likely to to be interesting that sort of thing okay so we could add in homeowners again we could add in one two maybe

a couple different options don't go mad here but that can really help then we get into demographics now you can see that all demographics are recommended but if i click in here we can be more specific around just female or male specific age ranges now i like to give google a lot of flexibility with performance max campaigns that's kind of the point here is that we're saying you go and work it out google here's all the data but if you are 99 female yes you could go ahead and just do female if you're or vice

versa if you're even say 80 20 one way or the other i would go with both and if your target core market is say 25 to 45 we wouldn't just go with 25 to 45 we would have it be broader give google more flexibility is better then when it comes to um additional demographics is an interesting point to highlight there's a couple of extra options do you want to target parents or not for some businesses that really matters like if you offer baby related stuff for others it doesn't matter at all and then the same

with household income right so there are various options that you can choose to specifically target and this is going to depend again on your business are you offering really luxury products maybe yes in which case you want to go with top earners maybe not um if if it's not something that's really important to your business i'd recommend keeping things nice and broad and you see that if we for example do it added anything we get this warning below include all demographics to increase leads so yeah for the most part that's what you want to do

so we're gonna go ahead go ahead and click save and that is now our audience signal all nice and set up we're gonna go ahead and click next and that brings us into the ad extension part now obviously because our campaigns could run on the search network as long as as well as lots of other places we need to be able to add in extensions like we would with a search campaign right so we've got site link extensions we can add in call out extensions all sorts of different options and i'd strongly recommend you add

in all the ones that are relevant to your business i've got separate videos on site link extensions and call out extensions so there'll be links to those in the description below if you want to check those out for more info i will be creating other videos about some of these other extensions so if you're interested in checking those out make sure you're subscribed i'm not going to add these in for now but you certainly want to go ahead and do that and then we click next and we get through to the summary now i've got

errors because i haven't actually added in things like images and headlines and stuff like that and that's fine that was not the purpose of this video to go through those things that's covered elsewhere i wanted to show you exactly how to set these up um performance max campaigns but when you don't have the errors you can come down you can go ahead publish that and it starts running now i think it's worth quickly talking about the pros and cons of performance max campaigns and whether you do don't want to use them so we'll do that

now so the pros of performance max campaigns are pretty significant firstly it's going to give you massive potential reach and if you've got a campaign that performs well and you want to go to scale it up performance max campaigns work really really well for that if you've got a search campaign that's delivered great results for example and you want to find an easy way to try and take that out to new markets performance max works really well it's also very quick and easy to set up right it would take you so much longer to set

up individual campaign types for all the different networks that's so much more work involved and less work you know is typically a good thing be able to accomplish your goals faster it's also great for beginners in that a lot of this process is automated so you're not going to run into some of the the real issues the the big mistakes that you may otherwise run into if you're not very experienced so it takes that off the table i think that's part of the reason why a lot of advertisers have turned to performance max a lot

of advertisers seeing great results with performance max and we also have to think about that performance max is still google's shiny new toy when it comes to advertising whenever it comes to new features and new tools there are lots of people within the company that are heavily invested in it working and working well so what we often see is that the new newest features sort of get a bit priority you know we don't get confirmation on this sort of stuff but we suspect it and they often deliver better results than perhaps they should or maybe

will over the long run because they've got this sort of initial boost and we're still within that window it's still google shiny new toy so maybe a great idea to test now there are cons associated with performance max as well though right so firstly you have less control and if you really care about how your brand is presented to your target audience performance max might throw up some issues because with all that testing with all those images all that text variation sometimes google is going to put together ads that don't really make sense and obviously

those people aren't going to go ahead and convert google will quickly work that out and they will then um go with ad options that do make sense because they'll see that in the data and the actions people take but there are going to be people that see ads see your brand represented in a way that is just a little bit odd okay so that's something to certainly be aware of also because you can't see as much specific data you don't have the same insights with performance max campaigns it's more difficult for you to take optimization

actions and improve results um over the long run and that can be really significant with google ads right often we say that months campaigns have been running for six months or nine months or 12 months perform a lot better than brand new campaigns because we've been able to work out each individual element how it performs what we need to delete what doesn't work as well with performance max it's much more of an automated process you don't get the same level of specificity and you're kind of just trusting google you're not able to make those incremental

improvements so for advanced google advertisers often they're still seeing better results going with more um control more specific campaign types like search for example than they are with just trusting it to google because they're able to make those optimizations and improvements another potential con that we do see with google with performance max campaigns is that google will sometimes favor lower value conversions even if you're optimizing for conversion value we talked about it previously but let's take the example of you know a website where someone can book a free consultation that's an inquiry into a service

really high value and there's also a conversion on there that is of people with an email opt-in just opting in for your newsletter or trying to get a free report for example now we want the free consultations more than we want the email opt-ins but sometimes we'll just see with a performance max campaign google getting you tons of those email opt-ins even if you've got conversion value and that's not great now you can manually override that because you can remove the email opt-in as a conversion goal from your performance max campaign and maybe you can

do that and then it will work just fine but that's something that can happen that you need to be aware of if you're going to use performance max campaigns so should you use performance max campaigns should you give it a go i think for just about all google advertisers it makes sense to at least test performance max campaigns even advanced google advertisers now you may well find that if you're a beginner even an intermediate google advertiser you get better results with performance max than with other campaign types in which case great you can carry on

using it advanced advertisers may not see that as much but it's certainly worth a test what we have found is that the ad accounts with more data more conversions they produce better results when you use performance max and that makes sense right because google's got so much to test if there's more conversions in your ad account google's got a better indication of who to advertise to when to advertise all those various data points and that can help you get better results so even if you maybe tested performance max at the beginning but you've been running

campaigns you've got more data you might want to re-test or if you're on the at the start and you don't see great results performance maps you go and use other campaigns maybe you want to test again in six months 12 months when you've got more data in your ad account that seems to be a really important point if you do decide to go ahead with performance max campaigns just be aware that there is that initial testing phase that you don't see as much with say a search campaign so don't expect to see fantastic results initially

but once it's up and running and got going often we start to see conversions coming in at a low cost and at large volumes which is obviously what we all want now before you go something to quickly mention and that's my company's google ads done for you services so we can create manage and optimize your google ad campaigns whether you want performance max campaigns or another campaign type or you just want us to decide for you we can do that we can take this work off your hands and hopefully get you much better results as

well so if you're interested you can click on a link in the video description below and yeah hopefully we get a chance to work together now whether you're going to use performance max campaigns or not to get the best possible results with google ads you need to know how to write fantastic headlines i show you exactly how to do that in this video here i provide a ton of examples and best practices it's well worth going through