Your Campaigns May Migrate to Performance Max Before You Know It
The ground is shifting fast towards automatic opt-ins for Google’s flagship new campaign type. Dylan Wanigasekera and Joshua Woodhams investigate.
Performance Max has come to dominate the search horizon for a while now. As Google’s attempt to help advertisers take advantage of multiple channels, this new campaign type needs minimal set up and promises to expand your reach in Google Ads.
The benefit is that Performance Max gives you the ability to launch multimedia ads across all of Google's platforms (YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps) in a single campaign. But this is also the risk.
As an agency, Kinase are naturally very keen to test the real results when control and data disappears in the name of platform improvements, and that is one of the traits of Performance Max. This was our initial scepticism, as discussed in our Secret Digital Veteran piece, Missing the Point of the Big Short - how incremental is the revenue which Performance Max delivers, when it can’t be directly tracked by channel or keyword?
If you have the know-how, you can use workarounds for the terrible YouTube creatives which Performance Max auto-creates, and for the necessity of advertising on your own brand terms - see our practical Performance Max set up guide. However, advertisers sold Performance Max as a solution for reach or for performance can be left susceptible to cost inflation and terrible automatic ads if they are not keeping a close eye on their campaign notifications, and if they don’t have a direct line to Google.
Automatic Upgrades for Smart Shopping Have Begun
As of a few days ago, some of our clients have been informed that their Smart Shopping Campaigns are being migrated to Performance Max with little warning. Accounts have been notified with “your Google rep will let you know”, or you will be told in the interface. According to Google’s official line, Automatic Upgrades for Smart Shopping Campaign will gradually progress and finish in September, but we have also heard that transition will “happen at any time within two weeks if you have been able to postpone the upgrade for two weeks”. In one case, we were even informed that the transition was occurring the next day, with no prior warning. This uncertainty is worrying, and we are reviewing every single client account so that we manage to identify those that need to request a postponement, or need to request workarounds for elements which won’t work for those clients.
Performance Max has seen some positive results in the early days, but as more advertisers use it, any early adopter advantage is being negated, with reports of Performance Max and Smart Shopping campaigns now seeing the same ROAS performance.
Preparing for Automatic Upgrades
For any advertiser concerned that their campaigns may migrate to Performance Max, we recommend you do the following:
Check your Google Ads account / and your emails for notifications about upgrading to PMax, and plan towards the given date
If you are not ready, then request a delay in the upgrade
If you have upgraded, review auto-generated YouTube creatives immediately (some of the auto created assets are truly awful as they take images from your site and create a video). If you are not happy with the results, contact Google and ask them to pause. Unfortunately, you cannot review your creatives until you have upgraded to Performance Max to pre-empt this. The alternative is to upload your own video creative - so if this is your preferred path, plan ahead and launch Performance Max before your Smart Shopping is automatically upgraded.
Not only does Google auto-generate videos for Performance Max, but we have also seen auto-generated headlines and descriptions, which can result in creative assets unrelated to your landing page. So this is also key to check immediately if auto-upgrade occurs.
Get Ready
Overall, Performance Max is here to stay, so our advice is to be prepared for migration and if possible, get ahead by launching Performance Max with a full set of your own creatives. If you are not prepared, then prepare as quickly as you can!
The checklist above is a starting point. Once launched, our set up guide lists the new features of Performance Max and how best to leverage them. Kinase is also planning incrementality tests as part of a wider marketing mix using Skai’s Impact Navigator. The results will allow us to assess the true value Performance Max actually drives towards each client’s business KPIs.
