New features to grow your business with Performance Max
As people move quickly between channels and devices, today’s consumer journey is always-on and rarely straightforward. Automation is helping businesses meet their customers at the right moment along this complex journey. Whether you’re looking to stay ahead of shifting consumer behavior or unlock incremental conversions from new places, Performance Max finds the optimal mix of Google Ads inventory and formats to help you drive better results. 1
In the coming weeks, we’re introducing new features to help you acquire new customers, better understand performance and start upgrading your Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max in just one click.
Focus on new customers
Performance Max optimizes results based on your conversion goals and looks for the highest-ROI conversion opportunities — regardless of channel. The new customer acquisition goal in Performance Max is rolling out over the next few weeks for all advertisers looking to generate leads or increase online sales. This was previously available for retailers using Smart Shopping campaigns and is now expanding to more advertiser goals in Performance Max.
This goal will allow you to either bid more for new customers compared to existing customers, or focus your optimizations on new customers only while maintaining your cost efficiency. You’ll also have more flexible ways to identify new customers, like providing your own first-party data through Customer Match lists, setting up conversion tags and using Google’s autodetection method.
Dime Beauty, a natural beauty and skincare retailer, was looking to acquire new customers while driving online sales across its product inventory. Dime launched the new customer acquisition goal with Performance Max and set a higher value for new customers compared to existing customers. The retailer grew sales by 64% and increased its return on ad spend (ROAS) by 50% compared to its campaign before enabling new customer acquisition. With the new customer acquisition goal, Dime even saw a 462% increase in new customers while maintaining their cost per acquisition.
Online travel company Luxury Escapes had ambitious goals to grow online sales for its travel packages, with separate targets for new and returning customers. Luxury Escapes launched a test with the new customer acquisition goal in Performance Max, choosing to optimize for only new customers. Following the test, the company saw a 45% increase in new customer revenue with a 21% increase in ROAS compared to its Performance Max campaign that didn’t use the new customer acquisition goal. Luxury Escapes has since expanded this strategy as an always-on growth driver.
Guide your campaigns with helpful insights
The Insights page helps you understand decisions guided by automation and find levers to improve results in your campaigns. In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out consumer interest insights to all advertisers to help you uncover search themes that are delivering conversions. Two new types of insights are also arriving for Performance Max.
With asset audience insights, you’ll be able to better understand how your text, image and video assets resonate with specific customer segments. For instance, if you’re an outdoor retailer running a campaign for bikes, you may find that exercise enthusiasts engage more with images of people mountain biking rather than product images of the bike itself. Using these insights, you can tailor your creative and influence your broader marketing strategy.
After you create your Performance Max campaigns, diagnostic insights will provide a snapshot of outstanding setup issues preventing your ads from showing. Each issue will include suggestions to resolve them, so you can easily and quickly get your campaign up and running. For example, if your creative assets are disapproved, you’ll be prompted to fix them so you can start serving your ads and avoid missing out on conversion opportunities.
Asset audience insights will show how your creative assets resonate with specific customer segments.
Diagnostic insights will help you easily identify and fix campaign setup issues.
Consumer interest insights will surface top-performing search query themes that are relevant to your campaigns.
Start upgrading your Smart Shopping campaigns
In January, we shared a preview of how to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max to access additional inventory and formats across YouTube, Search text ads and Discover. 2 Over the coming weeks, you’ll see a notification in your Google Ads account when the “one-click” upgrade tool is ready for your Smart Shopping campaigns. You’ll also be able to access the tool from the Recommendations page and the Campaigns page. You can start upgrading your Local campaigns in June.
When you upgrade your Smart Shopping or Local campaign, it will become a new, separate Performance Max campaign that keeps the learnings from your previous campaign to maintain consistent performance. The campaign budget and settings from your previous campaign will also be carried over. Visit our Help Center for more details on the upgrade experience.
Retailers across the globe are seeing continued success with Performance Max. In fact, advertisers who upgrade Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max see an average increase of 12% in conversion value at the same or better ROAS. 3
Estée Lauder Taiwan equipped its Performance Max campaigns with new high-quality creatives and first-party customer data. By powering automation with these critical inputs, Estée Lauder Taiwan achieved a 45% higher ROAS and a 41% lower cost per acquisition. The team has now fully replaced their Smart Shopping campaigns with Performance Max and is using it as the primary driver for e-commerce sales.
Upgrading your existing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns helps ensure you can take advantage of expanded inventory and get your campaigns ready for the holiday season. You’ll be able to choose when to upgrade your campaigns until the automatic upgrade process begins. Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically upgraded from July through September, and Local campaigns will be automatically upgraded from August through September. You’ll also be able to create new Performance Max campaigns through Google Ads, the Google Ads API, or starting in early summer, through e-commerce partners like WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
Check out our upgrade video tutorial and best practices to set up your Performance Max campaigns, and follow @AdsLiasion to stay informed throughout the upgrade process. On May 24, join us at Google Marketing Live where we’ll share what’s ahead for Performance Max.
