Performance Max: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?

Last week we arranged Google Ads Meeting with a little over 50 participants in Oslo. The programme included one of the most widely mentioned themes of the year: Performance Max. A panel discussion was held where Vegard Garder from Rocket, Maria Lindstad from Visibility and Ivo Gutu from the Online Trade Group shared their experiences with Performance Max so far. The discussion was moderated by Even Ødegård from INEVO. Here's a summary of what we think was most interesting! Less control and insight into the campaigns Performance Max reduces the availability of data that makes it more challenging to analyse what works and which ads are driving well. It is generally consistently agreed that Performance Max lacks insight into important figures that contribute to the difficulties in separating the results. Vegard has a smart tip. If you want more insight, you can break down the numbers a little bit different places in Google Ads to understand how much you use in different formats. Among other things, by extracting Cost Per View data you can distinguish what is YouTube. You can also view through reports click from a campaign that is linked to a Merchant Center ID so that you understand how much is Shopping--but there's no easy way to get an overview. More in the panel mentions that the insight is now better than it was before and that it is rumored that Google will improve this part much in the future. Should everyone upgrade to Performance Max? It was discussed whether it is worthwhile to go to Performance Max and whether this is something everyone should do. Vegard believes that a large enterprise that spends many millions should be more careful in the transition to avoid risking losses, but that a small enterprise with a low budget can go over more quickly. On the other hand, Ivo says that they have had opposite experience and seen good results by jumping right into Performance Max with large budgets quickly. Maria said performance Max gives everyone the opportunity to show up on several surfaces with several possibilities despite lower budgets for small businesses. Google will probably spend more time and resources on Performance Max that can result in other campaigns being phased out. Therefore, it is important to gain experience with Performance Max now. The transition may be worse in the future. How long should you wait for Performance Max to work? Google recommends that machine learning is 5 weeks. Is there a way to get this process going faster? The panel has a slightly different experience in this field. Maria recommends being early out getting things in place as well as having her own campaign dedicated to themes, whether it's Black Friday or something else to get the process going. In addition to this, it is discussed whether the migration of former Smart Shopping campaigns has worked or not. Vegard recommends a new campaign where you start with a lower budget and scale up about 20% every other week. However, Ivo has good experience in the migration of Smart Shopping campaigns with relatively fast machine learning process as this has gone faster than creating brand new campaigns. They have had good results from regularly optimising the donkeys to the campaigns rather than new campaigns. Do I get new customers with Performance Max? Many suspect that Performance Max is going for the audience that is most in the bottom of the region. Therefore, one thing to have in the back of mind is whether Performance Max finds many new customers or primarily picks up people with a high probability that they would buy anyway. Performance Max has some new features that are targeting new customers. There will also be separate types of campaigns targeting existing customers. The panel does not have much experience with this very thing, but is positive that Performance Max can evolve in the future to become even better at picking up new ones. How do you work with Performance Max? Performance Max is a new campaign format, which means that the same “old” ways of working are not necessarily so good. The panel is unanimous in working with the donkeys being much more important than before. Ivo tells us they look at it a little bit like working with social media and they'll be more interested in building in-house competence on making good photos and video assets. The disadvantage is that the better video assets you make, the more you're shown on youtube (which you might not get too much in this context.) On the other hand, the panel is quite agreed that if you don't make video yourself, it Performance Max automatically stores can be quite ugly. Maria and Vegard all recommend spending more time on feed optimization. This is an important carrier beam in the campaign. Summary The future Google Ads evolves into a system with less opportunities and control an earlier one. At the same time, there are many exciting opportunities when it comes to using AI and machine learning that can do many tasks better than we humans. The most important thing to take away from the panel discussion is to focus on getting experience with Performance Max, understanding how it uses your money and getting better at making good donkeys.