Google Performance Max (July 2022)

Market Context

For years now, technology giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and others have put into place the integrations, features, and practices to help marketers take advantage of the technological leaps that define the direction of digital marketing today: big data, savvy automation, omni-channel marketing, predictive intelligence and optimization.

Marketers are less and less able to get into the nitty gritty of each ad, email, or campaign to manually setup and continually optimize. It’s just no longer feasible for humans to do this at scale and with any modicum of success compared to those who leverage advanced technology. And that’s exactly why most of the marketing technology today is built around scale and automation; it’s far more efficient and more than that, the technology is more flexible and accurate than the humans.

 

 

Google Transition to Performance Max

In light of these industry-wide shifts, Google announced late last year that Performance Max will replace Smart Shopping and Local campaigns in the later half of 2022. Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. It is no coincidence that goal-based campaigns aligned tightly with the Fullpath philosophy and technical configuration of our solutions.

Performance Max is designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google's channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.

Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max combines Google's automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. They're all empowered by your specific advertising objective and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds you provide.

Read more about Performance Max Campaigns here

 

Fullpath and Google Performance Max

As a Google Marketing Partner, Fullpath was not only aware of these updates but we anticipated and prepared our infrastructure for this when we upgraded to the newest Google Ads API. The API update enabled us to lay the groundwork for incorporating into our platform Google Performance Max campaigns among many other exciting improvements we are working to implement.

As with all Google rollouts, we have opened a Beta testing group for customers who wish to test this new campaign type and have the dedicated funds and strategic flexibility to run thorough a complete testing cycle so that we can ascertain the types of improvements and performance success we can expect to see across our accounts and customer base. After Beta testing and analysis, we anticipate adding Performance Max to our Google Ads strategy in the coming quarter.

 

Beta Testing Performance Max 

It is important to note that all algorithmic improvements require sufficient time to gather a statistically significant amount of data in order to optimize performance. This typically requires more than 30 days of testing and dedicated funds in order to let the system run, learn and optimize in order to truly see the valuable impact such a campaign type can offer. 

Those who wish to participate in our Beta test, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager with your request so we can set up a conversation about your account configuration and beta test suitability, marketing goals, performance expectations and relevant timelines.

You can be sure that this Google update, and all others, are constantly incorporated into our CDXP as we work to ensure that we leverage any tools, technologies, and recommendations which enhance the speed, scale, and specificity of your Dealership advertising.