The Plain Burger
You choose convenience and leave everything to Google. You don't protect your brand name and you don't use extra Shopping or Search campaigns.
Performance Max is the new Google campaign type. The introduction of Performance Max obviously involves changes, which means that switching to Performance Max raises lots of questions. In this article, we review the developments and answer several important questions:
We put all our ideas about Performance Max into what we call the 'Burger Structure'. In doing so, we focus on Retail campaigns with a link to the Google Merchant Center. Later in this article, we explain the Burger Structure as a concept.
If you compare Performance Max as a campaign type with existing campaigns, you will immediately notice several things:
With a single campaign, you target all the Google Ads channels
With Performance Max, you create Search and Shopping ads in a single campaign. That's new. Performance Max also enables you to cover many other (extra) channels in the Google Ads network in one go.
Performance Max replaces Smart Shopping
With the introduction of Performance Max, Smart Shopping campaigns disappear. However, you can still use 'classic' Shopping campaigns instead of or as well as Performance Max campaigns. And you can still use 'classic' Search campaigns.
Ads are now called creative assets
In Performance Max, ads are now called "creative assets". In classic Search campaigns, we talked about ads, headlines and descriptions. Headlines and descriptions now come under creative assets, along with other ads like images and videos.
Google puts more emphasis on target groups
The use of target groups is emphasized more in Performance Max. Linking target groups is encouraged more and there are more possibilities to use target groups within Performance Max.
The changes with Performance Max offer various advantages to advertisers. However, some changes are not necessarily so favorable for advertisers.
The advantages can be divided into two main items:
Firstly, Performance Max offers simplicity. You no longer need to think about keywords. Google does that for you. And managing bids is not necessary either. You set a ROAS target and Google ensures that you achieve those ROAS targets. Finally, you upload your ads (creative assets) in one go, so you no longer need to upload and manage them in different campaigns. Google combines these creative assets and uses them in different channels.
There are also disadvantages. For example:
Performance Max provides less insight into keywords and campaign performance. With Smart Shopping campaigns, you couldn't see where you ranked on which keywords. Google has now continued that into Search campaigns. And again, you get no insight into keywords. To accommodate advertisers to some extent, Google offers an overview with the main clusters of keywords. However, that overview is less detailed. An interesting new option is that you can exclude several keywords at campaign level. This new option enables brand name protection within the Shopping results. More about this later in this article.
A second disadvantage of Performance Max is the scarcity in asset groups. The number of potential asset groups for Search campaigns is declining, as are the number of creative assets that you can then upload per group. In classic Search campaigns, you can create almost endless advertising groups (20,000 per campaign). With Performance Max, you have a maximum of a hundred asset groups. Compared with Smart Shopping, you therefore have more possibilities to create ads, but the question remains: what are the best hundred asset groups? In other words, how do you choose and prioritize asset groups? Again, we will address this later in this article.
Within classic Search campaigns, you can add more variation in your headlines and descriptions than with Performance Max. And it is no longer possible to include and exclude keywords with Performance Max as it was with classic Search campaigns. Furthermore, in Performance Max, extensions cannot be linked at ad level, only at campaign level. In short, the relevance of Search campaigns within Performance Max may decline. A less relevant campaign means higher costs and lower revenue. Google therefore offers the possibility to prioritize a classic Search campaign if that performs better than your Performance Max campaign. If you include your keywords exactly in a classic Search campaign, they also get priority in the Performance Max campaign.
Firstly, it's important that the ROAS you give in Google is an average that Google must achieve. The average ROAS is the ROAS that you achieve over your total clicks. The average ROAS deviates from your incremental ROAS. The incremental ROAS as defined here is the ROAS that you achieve with the (last) extra click on which your campaign is shown.
The incremental ROAS is lower than the average ROAS. This is because Google first uses the 'easy' ad chances. Easy chances include:
After Google has used the easiest chances, it moves on the next best chances. Your incremental ROAS then falls faster than your average ROAS. Once your average ROAS has been achieved - as set by you - your incremental ROAS will be well below average.
By using Performance Max over several channels at the same time, and with the extra attention for target groups, extra chances arise for Google to advertise compared with in the past. With Performance Max, Google can exchange the worst clicks for less poor ads with a better incremental ROAS.
For example, Google used to show your ad on a less relevant keyword. The incremental ROAS may be low, but Google did it anyway so long as you stayed inside the average ROAS. Imagine that Google can replace this keyword ad by a YouTube video that doesn't produce such good revenue either, but which does better than that poor keyword ad? The effect: your average ROAS declines less quickly, and Google can continue advertising for longer and spend more.
The fact that Google uses the easiest chances is not necessarily so bad. So long as you know what those easy chances generate in terms of revenue. You could then calculate what your ROAS setting should be to ensure your incremental ROAS does not fall below an unacceptable level. However, because Google offers increasingly less insight into your campaign results, you should remove the easy chances, if possible. This gives you more insight into 'pure' results.
It is also important that Google not only creates turnover with campaigns. Google also claims turnover which you could achieve elsewhere. It is important to be alert, certainly for easy chances whereby Google claims but does not create turnover. If big turnover volumes are also involved, you need to be extra alert. Why would you 'give' Google the revenue that are achieved with ads on your brand name?
Download our Performance Max white paper where we share everyting we know about this new Google Ads campaign type.
It is sensible not to see Performance Max as an individual campaign type. By combining Performance Max with classic campaign types, you retain more control over campaigns, and you can improve your performance. Step 1: cover your brand name.
Obviously, you don't want to give your brand name to the Performance Max campaign. The revenue on your brand name is often very big, and gives Google a lot of extra scope to use less good ads.
A sample calculation:
With Performance Max, you have no insight into how much turnover your brand name represents (as you do in the example), or into the return on your other ads. So, you can better keep your brand name out of the Performance Max campaign. To do this, you take the following steps:
Via a classic Search campaign, you can protect your brand name. It is also a good idea to set up another extra classic Search campaign. If your 'classic' Search campaigns continue to perform better, Google will give them priority, so long as your ROAS setting is the same as your Performance Max campaign. Classic Search campaigns can perform better because you can make much more specific ads focused on the Search results. You can list more titles, descriptions and extensions. Ads become more relevant and therefore convert better. You also maintain an overview of search tasks and thus insight into your market.
Another argument for using a classic Search campaign is that you prevent dilution of your revenue. Let's explain. Within Performance Max, you advertise based on products. If there are product groups (let's call them 'A' products) which generate higher revenue than other products ('B' products), you will be able to bid more for A products. In Search campaigns, you advertise on keywords, and it is much less easy to predict whether you are then selling A or B products. Your revenue and ROAS target tends more towards an average. If you bid more for A products in a Performance Max campaign, those A products will also rank on keywords. The risk is then that you don't show the full range appropriate to that keyword. Because B products are not highlighted. There is also the chance that you still sell B products. Both situations lead to a dilution of your revenue. With a classic Search campaign, you prevent this dilution, and you can adjust your bids more sharply.
Mark van Werven, CEO AdchieveWith a classic Search campaign you prevent dilution of revenue.
How do you optimally set up the Performance Max campaign? Here we address the following subjects:
The first question is how you want to divide campaigns. With Performance Max, you use a ROAS setting. For each campaign, you can only give one ROAS setting. Products for which you want to set the same bid can be grouped together.
Do you want to set a different bid for other products? In that case, you will need to include them in a separate campaign. A reason for separating products from each other may be a difference in profitability. But other factors may also play a role. Maybe you want to raise your bids for products for which you have lots of stock so that you reduce the stock. Or you have a strategic reason for bidding more for product categories so that competitors have no chance of building up a position in the market.
Theoretically, you could even set a different bid for each product. That gives you a lot of campaigns. Each campaign then only builds a small amount of data, meaning that the algorithm does not accumulate enough data to achieve good bids. You will therefore need to group products in campaigns for which you wish to set similar bids.
Each separate campaign containing a group of products then becomes a kind of bid bucket. How many bid buckets you create will depend on the difference in revenue between products and the number of products you have and the data you accumulate to ensure the good functioning of Google's bid algorithm. For the sake of convenience, we assume that you use three bid buckets:
The optimal bid per product can vary over time. Adjusting bids per product can then place the product in a different bid bucket. Google can manage this well and includes the history of the product before placing the product in the new bid bucket in the mix of underlying bids.
If products move between campaigns, it is important that the asset groups which were in the low bid, mid bid and high bid buckets correspond. In the new bucket, a moved product encounters its old creative assets again. In this way, you get campaigns with different ROAS settings, different products, but the same asset groups.
An important precondition with Performance Max is that you can only make 100 asset groups per campaign. The potential number of asset groups is often much bigger when you see all the brands, categories, combinations and individual products as a potential asset group. So, you will need to prioritize.
One way to prioritize asset groups is to look at sales volumes. Which brands, which product categories, combinations or which individual products are sold most? The higher the sales, the higher the priority and the more reason to create a separate asset group for that brand, that product category, combination or individual product. Other approaches to help determine the importance of asset groups are search volumes per theme or the size of target groups that you can link to creative assets.
If you still have fewer than 100 asset groups, you can create extra sets of bid buckets with different ROAS settings and different products. Each bid bucket within an extra set contains the same asset groups which only deviate from your previous set(s) of bid buckets.
Using target groups in Google Ads is not new. However, Google is adding several new specific options to the use of target groups in Performance Max.
In this article, we have suggested the ingredients for making a delicious burger. The burger basically consists of three parts:
You choose convenience and leave everything to Google. You don't protect your brand name and you don't use extra Shopping or Search campaigns.
To make a Veggie Burger, you consciously leave your asset groups empty. The idea is then to prevent you ranking on keywords. But make sure that you also turn off URL expansion as an option, otherwise Google will make creative assets itself. If you also leave out images, you will rank lower in other channels than Google itself and you will keep more control over where your ads appear.
In the Double Burger, you implement your entire campaign strategy twice. You focus part of your campaigns on new customers, whereby you bid higher. You target the other part on existing customers.
We look forward to seeing which other burgers will be made!
Download our Performance Max white paper where we share everyting we know about this new Google Ads campaign type.