The official Black Friday weekend is just days away (although it has already started for some brands) and Christmas is just around the corner – the busiest selling period for lots of retailers across the globe.
Bearing this in mind, Google has launched yet more updates to its Performance Max campaigns to help advertisers utilise them at this incredibly important time of year.
Performance Max campaigns are now available in Performance Planner
“Performance Planner is a tool that lets you create plans for your advertising spend and assess how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance.”
Until recently Performance Max campaigns were not available in Performance Planner, but should now be available for all advertisers.
The planner allows advertisers to forecast performance based on changes made to the campaign(s), such as budget alterations or adjustments to return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost per acquisition (CPA) targets.
It shows how increasing/decreasing spend impacts conversion value and ROAS/CPA. So depending on your target, whether it be revenue or return on ad spend, you can use the tool to forecast how much you’d have to spend to achieve your revenue target and what ROAS you might see for that. Or if you want to achieve a particular ROAS from your campaign(s), how much you’d have to spend to hit your target.
Asset updates
Asset group scheduling – Google has now added the option to schedule changes to your asset groups, such as pausing and enabling groups as and when necessary. This will be handy over these peak selling periods.
More headline options – the total number of headlines allowed within an asset group has been increased from 5-15.
New ways to analyse results
There are now explanations available, specifically for Performance Max campaigns. These explanations are associated with the product feed, so provide insight into things like product status and top-moving products – information that could prove very useful with this type of campaign.
First-party audience insights – when providing audience signals for Performance Max campaigns, a brand’s own first-party audience lists should be within the mix. Soon these data segments will be part of the audience insights section of the Insights tab for these campaigns. This means you’ll be able to easily see the value of this data and which lists perform best.
When it comes to best practices this season, Google recommends the following:
“A few days leading up to peak holiday periods, make sure to adjust your Performance Max campaign budgets and ROAS or CPA targets to maximize your visibility when consumers are shopping. For example, decrease your target ROAS before key holidays to show your ads more frequently during relevant moments. This will get your campaign ready to capture additional conversion opportunities. During the peak periods, make sure to monitor performance often and adjust as needed. You can also refer to recommendations for more specific guidance on where to make adjustments.
Consider using seasonality adjustments if you have a promotion, sale, or event where you expect to see drastic changes in conversion rates or values over a short period of time. You should only use seasonality adjustments for brief, infrequent events where you expect a temporary, but significant change (e.g. greater than 30%) that will last less than 7 days.
If you want to prioritize certain products this holiday season, you can create a separate Performance Max campaign with its own target and budget to promote these products. However, if you just want to highlight new holiday creative assets, you can create a new asset group for these in your existing Performance Max campaigns and pause your evergreen asset groups, if needed.”
These are all very good practices but advertisers still need to set a budget and try to stick to it. It’s important to ensure that campaigns aren’t suffocated by too ambitious ROAS or CPA targets, but at the same time it is important not to spend money that you don’t have to achieve a return that is too low and could end up hurting your business.
If you need any help with your campaigns this Christmas, please get in touch or for more information on Performance Max campaigns, see our previous posts.
