Ep 61: Who Should Use Performance Max Campaigns?

Let's talk Performance Max campaigns and Google Ads. That's what we're going to cover today.

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Marketing in 10. I'm Jim Lastinger. Today we're going to talk about Google Ads, and specifically we're going to talk about the fairly new kid on the block, Performance Max campaigns. Performance Max campaigns have been out there for a little while, so we've learned a little bit about them. We have some pretty good best practices in place.

Today we're going to talk about how you should and who should be using Performance Max campaigns. First of all, the types of accounts where Performance Max campaigns really work and really shine are going to be on accounts with lots of historical data. The more keyword-click information. The more conversions you have. The more spend that you have over time. The more historical data you have, the better trained your Performance Max campaigns are going to be, so that's a great place to start.

Another instance where Performance Max works well is with e-commerce campaigns. Performance Max does a really good job with e-commerce campaigns. It used to be shopping campaigns or smart-shopping campaigns. Performance Max does a really good job with those.

As always, the quality of your product feed is going to be the biggest determining factor here. But as long as you have a quality product feed, e-commerce campaigns are probably going to work pretty well in Performance Max. It's pretty much like smart-shopping campaigns from a year or so ago, but they just work a little bit better and they're getting better all the time.

To summarize who should be using Performance Max campaigns, the bigger your account the better. The more money you have to spend, the better. The more demand for your product or service, the more likely you are to have success with Performance Max. If you're in a bigger market, a bigger industry where there's more data, more spend, you're going to do better.

Conversely, these are the types of accounts that probably shouldn't use Performance Max. Stick with search campaigns or whatever else makes sense for you. Anytime you have a brand new account or an account that doesn't have much historical data, you probably don't want to start with Performance Max.

Accounts that don't have at least 30 to, I'd say, 50 conversions per month, Performance Max might not make the most sense for you. Just because you're not going to be able to give it enough data to really let the algorithm do its thing. Anybody that's in industries where there are legal restrictions, there are a lot of these for Google Ads, you want to probably not use Performance Max for those as well.

There are definitely a few instances where Performance Max probably doesn't make sense for you and you want to stick with the more traditional, a little bit old-school types of campaigns. Those are probably going to be a little bit better for you, but that's how I like to see accounts use Performance Max, so that's who should be using it.

If you are using Performance Max in your campaigns and getting good results, I would love to hear about it, so let me know. Leave a comment or send me an email, that would be fantastic. I want to hear from you. That's all that I have for this episode. I hope you got some value out of it and are at least considering using whether or not you should be using Performance Max in your own account.

I'll have show notes and a transcript available at JimLastinger.com/61. Please take a couple of minutes to rate and review the show. That really helps me grow this thing and help more people with their digital-marketing efforts. That's all for this week's episode. I'll be back soon next week with another episode of Marketing at 10. Until then, take care. Have an amazing day.