The new Google ads campaign type that looks to be the most automated campaign type so far has received praise but also attracted a lot of criticism. Performance Max campaign helps maximize your performance based on the chosen business goal by using all your account data and driving conversions across all of Google’s networks: Search, Display, Discover, YouTube, Gmail and Maps.

Main Benefits of using Performance Max

Time

The main selling point of the campaign is the time you save by having one campaign optimising your performance on all Google platforms towards the business goals and within your budget.

New Audiences Segments

This campaign allows you to discover new audience segments by using your audience inputs and offers you real-time data on customer intent and behaviour. You can also decide if your aim is new customer acquisition or retargeting current customers or…both equally.

Creative Assets Required

As you’re able to target 6 Google platforms in one campaign, you’ll need a reduced number of creative assets compared to running campaigns for each platform which is a bonus if you don’t have design teams to support with images and videos

Main Disadvantages of using Performance Max

Lack of insights

Compared to the other campaign types, Performance Max doesn’t offer as many insights about traffic sources, networks, placements and keywords, especially if the data volume is small. Though Google is releasing more reporting capabilities, these are not as granular as desired and unless you have a large volume of traffic some data sources are under the ‘others’ category which leaves a lot of guesswork

Lack of control

Performance max is very easy to set up and scale but when it comes to controlling it lacks control over targeting, networks, placements, and even keywords. As the data available it’s pretty restrictive, you have to rely on machine learning to do all the optimisations and assess based on the limited performance data available. Users are not able to add negative keywords and you would have to contact your Google account manager to do that.

What may happen is that the campaign budget goes mostly on brand as they would be the most efficient keywords. Make sure you have normal search campaigns too that have a high-Quality score to avoid Performance Max overlapping.

Fraudulent traffic

Performance max shows on all Google platforms which help scale very fast however, it will also make your activity more susceptible to fraudulent traffic. The campaign is still evolving and due to the limited insights, it will be difficult to identify what is legitimate traffic. The best way to avoid this issue is to have ad fraud detection software that will prevent bots from clicking on your ad and wasting your advertising budget.

Conclusion

The Performance max campaign is great for users with limited resources and time, as the AI and machine learning behind it will do the heavy lifting for you. However, it still requires human intervention and knowledge to make sure it’s achieving the desired results. Even though it's recommended for beginners due to the low maintenance and easy set-up, the lack of insights and reports makes it challenging to assess the performance without drawing wrong conclusions. Therefore, Performance Max needs to be tested for at least a few months assuming it has been set up correctly and then deciding how it fits with the rest of the customer journey funnel and marketing mix.

Performance Max - What are the Pros & Cons