Performance Max Best Practices

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In 2020, Google disclosed plans for a new goal-based campaign type, Performance Max (PMax), designed to help advertisers streamline their campaigns across all Google Ads channels. This innovation was officially rolled out in November 2021. This campaign type quickly gained popularity and changed the game for advertisers. But what exactly are the benefits of PMax, and can it really boost online performance?

Performance Max allows advertisers to use a single campaign to reach users across Google’s range of advertising channels – YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, and Gmail – to achieve their business goals, whether it be leads, sales, or traffic. It is really incremental, especially for businesses with limited budgets, and is highly automated, relying primarily on the Google algorithm. However, this means that we can do more than just set up the campaign, and it will generate the desired results. We can talk a lot about optimising this campaign type, but today, the focus is on the creative aspect, specifically banners and text messages.

As PMax can reach your customers across all of Google’s channels, we must consider and carefully select the creative materials needed for the set-up. The first and most crucial step is identifying our target audience based on interests and demographics.

Next, it’s time to set up our asset group. Three types of assets need to be added, and we will discuss each and every type, along with its best practices.

1.Texts

Similar to display campaigns, in PMax, we have to fill in short and long headlines, as well as descriptions.

Text requirements:

  • Headlines: 3-15 headlines, with a limit of 30 characters, without using punctuation marks such as question marks or exclamations.
  • Long headlines: 1-5 long headlines, with a limit of 30 characters, considering the same punctuation requirements as with short headlines.
  • Descriptions: 2-5 descriptions, with one of up to 60 characters and the rest of no more than 90 characters.
  • Business name: 1-25 characters.

Best practices for text assets in Pmax

  • Enhance text assets. Diversify the text messages to reach a broader audience. Users have changing behaviours and habits. 
  • Use the maximum number of text assets. Using as many text assets as possible allows the algorithm to find the best combination for each user.
  • Unique selling proposition. What sets your business apart from the competition? Remember to emphasise it, as it’s the surefire way to grab the target audience’s attention.
  • Grab attention. Holding the user’s attention is becoming increasingly challenging. Doing so in the first few seconds is essential to generate better results.
  • Optimise texts if needed in case of low performance.

2.Images

In Performance Max campaigns, there are a total of six image assets available:

  • Landscape image
  • Square image
  • Portrait image
  • Square logo
  • Landscape logo

Formats need to align with the following specifications and requirements:

  • Landscape format (1.91:1) – minimum size 600x314px, recommended 1200x628px.
  • Square format (1:1) – minimum size 300x300px, recommended 1200x1200px.
  • Portrait format (4:5) – minimum size 480x600px, recommended 960x1200px.

The maximum number of banners is 20, and the maximum file size is 5120 KB.

  • Logo

The logo is used separately and can be in:

  • Square format (1:1) – minimum size 300x300px, recommended 1200x1200px.
  • Landscape format (4:1) – minimum size 512x128px, recommended 1200x300px.

The maximum number of images of your logo is 5, and the maximum file size is 5120 KB.

Design guidelines for your target audience

  • Emphasise the product or service that you promote in the banner.
  • Avoid using too much text. The inventory screen available on some display networks could be tiny. Therefore, long messages with small fonts can be challenging to read.
  • Engage your audience. We are bombarded with product banners daily, and users often ignore them until they encounter something engaging that triggers their emotions.
  • Unique selling proposition. It is crucial to highlight what sets you apart from your competitors. If you run ads for a shoe store, for instance, you should highlight the essence of what makes your product or service better.
  • Perform tests. Experimentation is crucial in advertising. What types of assets can you test with? Use, for instance, a banner with promotional text and one without it – the results may surprise you.
  • Automatic overlays. Avoid adding call-to-action buttons at the bottom of your banner since they could be overlayed with the automatic CTA buttons from the platform. 
  • Avoid uploading photo collages or images with complex compositions.

Although campaign set-up and targeting are essential, banners also play a significant role in optimisation. Be sure to monitor your Pmax campaign, as Google Ads will start to provide information about your creative performance a few days after the campaign begins. Feel free to replace banners with low ratings instead of solely deleting them.

3.Videos

As mentioned earlier, with PMax, you can advertise on YouTube. There is a single type of video asset with the following requirements:

  • Ratio: horizontal, vertical or square.
  • Length: 10 seconds.
  • The video must be uploaded to YouTube.
  • Suggested quantity: up to 5 videos added to your Pmax campaign
  • When you do not add your own video, one may be generated for you by Google Ads.

 *If you don’t have your own videos uploaded to YouTube, you can now create such within the Google Ads interface using your banners. There are ready-made templates to help you in the process.

Creating a compelling video

  • Use audio in your videos. Many people only listen to videos, especially with the picture-in-picture** feature, so engaging them with sound is crucial.
  • Use different formats. A new YouTube format – YouTube shorts – is gaining popularity. Adapting your videos to these formats will bring you additional reach.
  • Capture attention in the first 3-5 seconds while the “Skip ad” button is not yet visible.
  • Highlight your competitive advantages.

**Picture-in-picture (PiP) is a feature found in TV receivers, PCs and smartphones, consisting of a video stream playing within an inset window, freeing the rest of the screen for other tasks.

Performance Max campaigns are an excellent way to maximise results and explore the engaged audience. However, careful selection of materials according to your product/service specifications and target audience, as well as occasional optimisation, are crucial.

Follow our YouTube channel and see how to create a new asset group in a PMax campaign. Watch the video here.

Auto-Apply Recommendations in Google Ads

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Online advertising helps you target your ads to the profile of customers you want and filter out those who don’t. If you advertise with Google Ads or plan to do so, you should know how to use the Recommendations tab by Google.

The recommendations tab is an entire section dedicated to helping you improve your performance. Each recommendation provides customized suggestions to help you increase your campaign’s performance.

However, it’s important to note that not all recommendations are suitable for all businesses. Each business has a unique goal, strategy, and user journey. Therefore, it’s essential to carefully review and evaluate the recommendations in the context of your specific business case before implementing them.

This article outlines our agency’s best practices of dos and don’ts in activating Google’s recommendations.

Types of Recommendations and How They Work

The Recommendations page analyzes your account’s performance history, campaign settings, and Google trends to generate automatic suggestions for your active campaigns. Recommendations typically fall into several categories:

  1. Repairs are recommendations related to the settings of your accounts, campaigns, and ads.
  2. Bidding and Budgets usually suggest increasing your daily budget or changing your bidding strategy.
  3. Keywords and targeting suggest modifying the targeting of a specific ad group, adding new keywords or modifying existing ones, and changing their match type.
  4. Ads and Assets indicate a need to rewrite your ads or add extensions to help improve your ad performance. You could optimize headlines, descriptions and landing pages and add images or videos.
  5. Measurement provides recommendations and changes related to measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of your campaigns. Suggestions include settings to track conversions (Conversion actions), automated bidding strategies (Smart Bidding), Google Analytics configuration, and other aspects of performance analysis.

Applying Recommendations Automatically

Auto-Apply recommendations are a feature that automatically applies recommendations from the Recommendation tab to your advertising campaigns without your manual approval. Google suggests optimization suggestions based on your campaign settings and performance and will only auto-apply your pre-set recommendations.

While auto-apply recommendations save time from manual work, the disadvantages are that they only sometimes work according to your business goals and, at times, require more manual control.

Below is a list of AARs we don’t suggest activating:

  1. Add responsive search ads & Improve your responsive search ads allows Google to generate new ads or change existing ones, including adding new headlines or descriptions. Even though Google uses semantic search to understand search queries, we can only partially rely on it to build grammar structures and spell words correctly in Bulgarian.
  2. Remove redundant keywords removes keywords Google considers inappropriate. For instance, identical words or phrases may appear in multiple match types (e.g., both in broad and exact match). Activating this recommendation may not be the best option for your account, as the platform doesn’t always consider your business specifics or strategy.
  3. Add new keywords & Add broad match keywords. These are two settings where Google adds new keywords or upgrades existing ones to broad match. Recently, Google’s been recommending upgrading to broad match types as it helps identify related queries. Once again, this option should be considered only in your business context. Regardless of the keywords match types that you use, ensure keyword selection is well controlled. Otherwise, you’ll be spending your budget on irrelevant search queries. 
  4. Expand search campaigns to display network suggests expanding your campaigns’ visibility to Google’s display network, using unspent Search budgets. Search and Display typically serve different advertising goals, campaign characteristics and audience types. We strongly advise creating separate Search and Display campaigns with their own budgets and settings.
  5. Change Bidding provides suggestions related to modifying your bidding strategy. Some of them are relatively safe to activate, but generally, changing the bidding strategy is a significant strategic step for your account that you should be able to manually control in the context of your business. 

Monitoring Performance with Auto-Apply Recommendations

If you decide to activate any of the automatic settings, click the Campaigns icon in your Google Ads account. In the top right corner, click Auto-apply, which will take you to a separate menu where you can review the settings you want to implement.

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