Author: Jackson Byrne, Paid Search Executive at Visuasoft

Here's our early insights  into using these new features to maximise your success in Performance Max campaigns.

Campaign-level brand exclusions

The introduction of campaign-level brand exclusions allows the user to exclude brands within Performance Max to influence traffic in Search and Shopping. According to Google, this - unlike negative keywords - helps block traffic even with misspellings or foreign scripts. If utilised correctly, this is a great bonus as it means you can exclude third parties such as; Amazon, eBay, and Argos amongst others as well as any direct competitors. 

Google's algorithm can also identify whether a brand's name is relevant to the search term. For example, excluding the brand ‘Apple’ will not exclude a search term such as ‘grow apple tree’, because Google is able to identify that the keyword ‘apple’ in this search term is not being referred to as Apple the brand.

Page feeds

This new feature will allow users to upload page feeds of URLs so Google can better direct the importance of certain URLs towards relevant search queries. With the feature being turned on, Google will understand the URLs that have been uploaded are important so it will prioritise pushing these pages. 

You will also be able to group these URLs using labels and apply them to the most suited campaign or asset group. This will be helpful in accounts that use promotions, especially in the Black Friday period.

Experiments (already available for some accounts)

Google is aware that Performance Max isn’t for everyone, which is why they have created ‘Experiments’. Experiments allows users to create Standard Shopping and Performance Max campaigns simultaneously,  producing comparable data that will help you to identify which campaign type is more suitable to meet your objectives. You can also add Display, Video and Discovery campaigns into the ‘Experiment’ depending on whether they have the aligning settings and conversion goals.

Google’s best practice recommends running ‘Experiment’ campaigns for 4-6 weeks with a clear hypothesis goal that is consistent for all campaigns concerned. This tool will benefit accounts that have struggled to compare with their performance moving from Smart Shopping into Performance Max.

Improving video assets (available to all accounts)

There has been a lot of frustration around Google's automated video assets, with little to no freedom over how they are presented. By identifying the irritation here, Google has allowed users to create video assets with the ability to choose video templates and upload appropriate imagery. You can also now create more than one video per campaign. This feature is now available to use in Performance Max.

Reporting and insights

Google is introducing Reporting and Insights into Performance Max allowing the ability to identify statistics such as Conversions, Revenue, Cost and ROI at asset group level. This creates many opportunities, particularly in identifying strategy types. For example, if the asset groups don’t perform well, this gives the user a clearer suggestion to try a different approach, such as using no assets.

Budget Pacing Insights will be a new feature rolled out to help users understand how the budget has been optimised by presenting the user with projected spend, customised recommendations and forecasted conversions. This tool will be very beneficial for understanding the best strategy for your campaign and learning how to optimise it. 

Conclusion

These brand new features have been what users have been hoping for since the arrival of Performance Max. Given how limited the current reporting is, the asset level insights - along with Budget Pacing - are huge improvements in how we can strategically look at ways to optimise campaigns and improve their results. 

Another great bonus will be the time saved in comparing strategies, with the new Experiments tool allowing us to directly compare stats within the interface at a glance.

Google has not yet stated any dates in which for when these new features will be released, but we hope they will be rolled out through 2023 and that the majority will be available by the end of the year.