Nine campaigns were some of the first to launch a Performance Max campaign, most were successful, but some rightfully, weren’t - the agencies tapped as the initial guinea pigs shared their initial stories of success along with their learnings.
At the beginning of this year, Google launched a beta test of their newest Performance Max offering. Marketing Agency “A” was one of the first to join the experiment and shared which campaigns the new feature would suit and what results it would bring to the client.
The Case Study:
Performance Max is a new type of a Google automated placement. It essentially allows advertisers to create ads, set up targeting, and algorithms will independently choose placements and set bids to more efficiently serve ads. Performance Max is different from other “smart” campaigns: ads can appear in Google Search, Discovery Feed, YouTube, and Gmail. In addition, Performance Max has new available reports and analytics. In the Insights section, advertisers can see and find which specific combinations of creative are most effective.
As Google has noted, the beta version has just moved to open status, and the feature will soon appear in everyone’s Google Ads or their SA360 UI. Advertiser requests to use Performance Max were already in high demand for many reasons - in particular, this has the potential to be the most innovative placement Google has ever offered and is fully based on the capabilities of Google’s AI and machine learning.
Google invited Marketing Agency “A” to be one of the first to try out Performance Max. The agency analyzed the features and decided to use it as part of a campaign promoting products for legal entities.
The first experience of Marketing Agency “A” was a federal advertising campaign to promote online lending for businesses. The team agreed with the client that testing would be expanded if the first experiment was successful.
First experiment:
To get started with Performance Max, the marketing team chose a campaign to promote loans for small and medium-sized businesses, which can be quickly obtained through the website or mobile app. As part of the campaign, the agency prepared banners, videos for YouTube and text ads. They also set up remarketing for landing page visits about loans for business and the entire section of the corporate block. The marketing agency also added targeting to audiences that are interested in business lending and commercial real estate. To complete the testing of the tool, the planned CPA was not set, to avoid scale issues. The experiment showed that using Performance Max reduced the cost of a lead by 75% compared to planned, by 58% compared to Google search, and by 84% compared to Google networks.
When the campaign to promote online lending was completed successfully, the project team continued the experiment with the promotion of business products. The agency launched an advertising campaign to improve the conditions of bank’s settlement and cash services using Performance Max. Targeting was set for the entire territory of the country, financial services for enterprises and other banking products were selected among the interests of the potential audience. Compared to planned, the actual CPL of the campaign decreased by 76%. Relative to CPL for search, the value decreased by 38%.
The use of Performance Max turned out to be so effective that after both successful campaigns, the Marketing agency launched new campaigns for B2C products based on the best practices of previous experiments. For example, the advertising campaign of a bundle subscription service for individuals was ongoing at the time of the study — it started in mid-June and lasted until the end of 2021. The preliminary results with Performance Max activated show: the CPL decreased by almost 65% compared to the planned one, and the search for general queries - by almost 77%.
An Unsuccessful Experience:
But not all experiments went well. It turned out that in some types of campaigns, Performance Max did not improve performance. For example, in one of the agency's tests, was aimed at application downloads. The CPL soared by 1289% compared to the planned one. As a result, the team canceled the campaign.
Automatic formats of advertising systems are best trained to work with big data, so campaigns of highly targeted products may not see any benefit from Performance Max. Other important factors are the size of the potential audience and the number of targeted actions. The more data the algorithms have, the more accurate they are and the better the advertising performance.
When is Performance Max Useful?
Recently, Performance Max switched to open beta mode - any advertisers can test this new type of campaign. Since April 2021, the marketing agency has launched nine advertising campaigns using Performance Max and, based on this experience, has collected several tips for brands on how to use the feature.
The agency found out that Performance Max is best suited for promoting products and services that are relevant to a wide audience of potential customers - these are bank cards, business loans, cash management services. Performance Max is also recommended for e-commerce projects, marketplaces, and EdTech.
Performance Max Checklist:
Connect conversions to your Google Ads account to optimize the format for the target action.
Use different formats - texts, banners, videos.
Choose a wide audience for targeting so that the algorithms find the most converting segments.
The system is trained on the received data, so the testing period should be at least three weeks.
Do not limit the planned CPA in the settings too
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