Performance Max Campaign: Pros, Cons, and Benchmarks

Google Ads are a staple of any paid ad campaign, and Performance Max campaigns have the potential to maximize any business's ROAS. These specialized campaigns leverage best-in-class AI from Google to drive ad bidding, targeting, and creatives, all with the goal of driving growth.

Should you use Performance Max campaigns to help grow your business? Learn more today to decide if they’re the right choice for your current goals.

Running a Performance Max Campaign: Pros and Cons

Should you run a Performance Max campaign or use the other Google Ads campaigns you might be more familiar with?

Performance Max uses Google’s advanced AI to inform bidding, placement, and creatives to maximize the results of your ads. However, they still might not be the right choice for everyone.

So let’s review the pros and cons of these types of ads to help you decide if they’re worth using for your current business objectives.

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Pros of Performance Max

There’s a good reason why plenty of organizations depend on Performance Max as their primary Google Ads campaign type. Some of the pros of Max are:

• Leading-edge automation: Google is an industry leader in AI and automation, and Max allows you to put their expertise to your advantage. You’ll sidestep needing to handle the nitty-gritty details compared to other options, and instead, you'll put the platform to work generating revenue.
• Optimized for conversions: Conversion rates are one of the essential KPIs for eCommerce and SaaS stores to stay on track and improve. Performance Max focuses on using past results of your campaign to drive better conversions as it goes. Ideally, you’ll experience growing conversion rates as you run the campaign.
• Fewer manual tasks: Performance Max removes a significant amount of manual tasks, both during configuration and once it’s in motion. You’ll still need to evaluate performance, provide new creatives, and refine audience targeting — but plenty of other tasks are entirely removed from your plate.

Cons of Performance Max

However, not everyone will be happy with Performance Max's results, making it less appealing than other Google Ads options for some companies. A few of the primary cons to keep in mind are:

• Less granular control: You’ll have less control over the campaign when compared to other Google Ads campaign types. For example, if you need a specific type of bidding strategy, Performance Max likely is not the best choice.
• Cannot add negative keywords: Negative keywords tell the platform you specifically do not want to target those keywords. Providing negative keywords can be crucial for some industries but cannot be done in Performance Max. For some, this alone makes it a less-than-ideal choice.
• Analyzing sources can be challenging: Understanding the exact source of a new conversion can be difficult. Since Max continually experiments with different creatives and keywords, you won’t know exactly which combination caused someone to convert.

Performance Max Campaign Google Ads Benchmarks

Paid ads benchmarks give you an idea about how your results compare or the general idea of the results you might have. Performance Max benchmarks for all industries are:

• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): $0.62
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR): 1.01%
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): $36

Keep in mind that the above figures are for any advertiser using Performance Max, which means they’re a very rough estimate of what you might experience. Every industry has different price points, motivating purchase factors, and competition for ad placement — so your results can vary slightly or dramatically from the above benchmarks.

Fortunately, Varos allows you to benefit from real-time benchmarking specific to your industry. Then, you can take strategic action to improve your Google Ads conversion rate and other important metrics.

Below, you can see how our platform shows your Google Ads results alongside your competitors.

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Performance Max Best Practices

Does Performance Max seem like a good choice for your business? Following effective best practices is crucial to get the most out of your campaigns. 

Google gives advertisers best practices for Performance Max campaign structure, targeting, and other important factors. Let’s break down their advice and add-on to it so you can get the most from your campaigns.

Give Campaigns Time to Generate and Learn From Data

Performance Max shines because of its leading-edge AI that drives decisions aiming to make the most of your budget.

However, your campaigns will start with absolutely no data to inform these decisions. The platform will start with best guesses, track and analyze results, then start improving.

Google recommends letting your Max campaign run for at least six weeks to generate enough data. After six weeks, you’ll be ready to evaluate its results as compared to other paid ad campaigns.

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Add Multiple Text and Image Assets

You’ll need to provide Google with five versions of each text asset (headlines and descriptions). You also need to provide five versions of image assets. 

And those are minimum figures; Google advises you to use as many assets as possible, provided they’re relevant to your campaign. 

Why does Performance Max need so many different assets? It will experiment with different combinations of your assets to find which ones provide the best results. Once enough time has passed, your paid ads will be refined using the right assets to meet your goals.

Target the Right Audience

Audience targeting is important for every paid ad campaign, and Performance Max is no exception. 

On top of the typical reasoning of reaching the right people, you’ll also speed up the AI’s algorithm ramp-up. This faster ramp-up means you’ll spend less time and money waiting for the platform to optimize itself and start having the results you want much faster than otherwise.

Using Performance Max for Ecommerce

Google advises eCommerce stores to use all of the above tips in addition to a few other best practices, including:

• Leverage new creatives: You don’t need to reset the campaign to add new creatives, so continually provide updated content to the platform. Provide new copy and visual elements for the platform to experiment with to potentially drive better results.
• Plan ahead for sales: If you’re running a weekend sale, start a more general campaign 2-3 before the sale begins. Then, refresh creatives to sales-focused creatives so you can do time-sensitive campaigns without harming performance.
• Prioritize visuals: Online shoppers base a large amount of their decisions on visual elements. Provide intriguing visuals from the beginning, and keep adding new ones as you go.

Leverage Varos to Enhance Your Google Max Campaigns

Google’s Performance Max can drive powerful results to help grow your business. However, you still need to continually review and optimize your campaigns to maximize results. Using industry-wide benchmarks allows you to gauge your metrics so you can make tactful changes to drive better results.

Varos is a unique platform that aggregates and analyzes marketing data to give our users the full story behind their results. Below, you can see how our platform shows your results right alongside your competitors, so you always know how you compare.

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Ready to step up your Google Ads campaigns with real-time competitor benchmarking? Contact us today to see how Varos can help.

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About the Author

Yarden Shaked

Co-founder & CEO at Varos

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