Create a Performance Max campaign with online sales or lead generation goals

1. In your Google Ads account, click the create button , then select Campaign.
2. Choose “Sales”, “Leads”, “Website traffic“, “Local store visits and promotions”, or “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” as your campaign objective.
3. After you confirm your conversion goals and select Performance Max as your campaign type, you can click Continue.
   • Note: Your account goals will be automatically populated, but you can remove the default goals, or add new goals based on your desired outcome.

1. In the “Bidding” section, select a bid strategy.
   • Conversions: If you check the checkbox for “Set a target cost per action”, the campaign will try to meet the Target CPA you enter.
   • Conversion Value: If you check the checkbox for “Set a target return on ad spend”, the campaign will try to meet the Target ROAS you enter.
2. (Optional) Under "Customer acquisition", check the "Bid for new customers only" checkbox if you want to refine your target audience, regardless of bid strategy. Learn more About the new customer acquisition goal.
   • Note: To bid for new customers, you'll need to include an audience segment with at least 1,000 active members in at least one network.

Set your bid strategy

Based on your goals, Performance Max will help set the right bids for every auction to optimize your campaign.

• If you’re tracking values with your conversions, it’s recommended that you use the “Maximize conversion values” bid strategy.
• If you aren’t tracking values and care about all of your conversions equally, consider the “Maximize conversions” bid strategy.
• If you want your campaign to try to meet your Target ROAS, select "Maximize Conversion Values" and check the checkbox for "Set a target return on ad spend".
• If you want your campaign to try to meet your Target CPA, select "Maximize Conversions" and check the checkbox for "Set a target cost per action".

Learn how to Choose your bid and budget.

1. On the “Campaign settings” page, select the locations to target under “Locations”.
2. To target a location that isn’t listed, select Enter another location, enter the name of the place you want to target, then select Target or Exclude.
   • If you want to target specific places within a location, select Nearby and again select Target or Exclude locations.
3. Under the “Languages” dropdown, select the languages your customers speak. You can select multiple languages to show your ads to specific sets of customers.
   • Note: For more location targeting options, use “Advanced search”. You can add location in bulk or enter a location and radius around that specific location that you'd like to target.
4. Finalize any additional settings you’d like to set up under “More settings”. Click Next.

Turn on automatically created assets

If you keep automatically created assets selected, Performance Max campaigns may auto-generate assets if Google AI predicts that your campaign performance can be improved. Google AI curates text and images from your landing pages and shows them in your ads when it’s predicted to improve performance. Then, you can add information like brand colors to help your campaign look more personalized.

If both the automatically created assets settings (text assets and Final URL) in Google Ads are checked and turned on for your campaign, your final URL may be replaced with a more relevant domain based on customer intent , that uses a dynamic headline, description, and creative assets from your landing page’s content. By turning this feature on, you can increase your campaign’s ability to serve.

Brand guidelines

With brand guidelines, you can control how your brand is represented in your automated assets or Performance Max campaign formats. You’ll be able to easily upload the following customizations in the same place once per campaign:

• Brand font
• Brand color
• Business name
• Business logo assets (1-5 images)

More settings

You can set up ad scheduling, campaign start and end dates, and URL settings under “More settings”.

Ad scheduling

Use ad scheduling to determine the number of days and hours your ad will show. For some goals, you may want your ad to only show during business hours or when you are available to handle customer inquiries.

• Learn more About ad scheduling.
• Learn how to Create an ad schedule.

Exclude brand traffic

You can prevent your Performance Max campaign ads from serving for specific brand searches (including misspellings) by creating a Brand list in your account and applying it to your Performance Max campaign.

Learn more About brand settings for Search and Performance Max.

Campaign URL options

The tracking template is where you put tracking information. Performance Max only supports the account-level or campaign-level tracking template. Any tracking template at the lower level, such as ad group or product group, will be automatically removed.

You can use URL parameters within the template to customize your final URL. When an ad is clicked, the information is used to create your landing page URL.

Page feeds

Page feeds allow you to provide a set of URLs that will be used to serve ads for your Performance Max campaign, including to generate dynamic content like headlines or descriptions when it’s predicted to better match user intent.

Learn more about How to use page feeds in Performance Max.

Tip: You can create one or more asset groups with assets related to a single theme or audience. After creation, combine assets from the same group to create ads that serve across Google Search, Google Maps, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discovery feed, and Google partner websites. Hover over the question mark icon to learn more about the requirements.

You can create one asset group before launching your Performance Max campaign and additional asset groups after setup. Your assets will automatically be assembled into all applicable formats and show the most relevant ad creative.

Audience signals

Audience signals allow you to add audience suggestions that help Google Ads automation optimize for your selected goals. Although adding audience signals is optional, using audience signals can help you accelerate and guide Google AI on the ideal way to optimize your campaign.

Remember that Performance Max campaigns may show ads to relevant audiences outside of your signals if they have a strong likelihood of converting to help you meet your performance goals.

• Learn more about how to Build audience signals.
• Learn more about how to Use the Audience builder to reach the right audience for each campaign and ad group.

Ad strength

Ad strength is an indication of the relevance and range of your ad creative combinations. Having more relevant and unique content can help you get the right ad in front of your customers and improve your ad’s performance.

Ad assets

Ad assets expand your ads and give people more reasons to view your ads or take action on them. Assets add useful business data below your ad, including locations, additional links, prices, and more. For this reason, assets are recommended in Performance Max campaigns. Learn more About assets.

In Performance Max campaigns, ad assets are tied to specific marketing goals and will be featured more prominently based on the campaign’s goal. Ad assets can:

• Display information that gives the user an opportunity to learn more about your business.
• Display actions that invite the user to do more than visit the website. Some actions covered may be to call the business, submit a lead form, or view locations.
• Invite the user to gather more information about the business or extend interaction between the business and user.

Video creation in Google Ads

You can either upload your own videos during campaign creation or use the free Google Ads video creation service to create horizontal or vertical videos for your campaigns. If you don't have a video asset, and you don't want to use auto-generate videos, consider using the video creation tool. To create a video in Google Ads, choose a template from the Asset Library and upload the following items:

• Branding elements like a logo or brand colors
• Images like product or lifestyle pictures
• Video-friendly messaging

When you create your video, Google will automatically resize your video ads to increase performance and improve ad strength across platforms. Remember that you can also crop or refocus images in Google Ads before you create and upload your video to a designated YouTube channel for use in a campaign. Learn more about how to Create a Video campaign.

Your budget establishes a monthly charging limit for an individual campaign. The charging limit is the average daily budget that you set, multiplied by the average number of days in a month. While your spend may vary each day, you won’t pay more than your monthly charging limit. Learn more About spending limits.

For Performance Max you should:

• Set an average daily budget of at least 3 times your CPA or cost/conv. for the conversion actions selected for your campaign. You have the flexibility to change your budget at any time.
• Check your account daily to know how your campaigns have performed so far.
• Remember that on days when your ads are likely to get you more traffic, you may spend up to 2 times your average daily budget. Those days are balanced by the days when your spend is below your average daily budget.

Before you finish setting up your campaign, you'll be taken to a review summary with the details of your new campaign. Select Publish Campaign to complete the process.

Related links

• About Performance Max campaigns
• Build an asset group
• About automatically created assets in Performance Max campaigns
• About asset group reporting
• About asset reporting in Performance Max
• Conversion reporting by asset in Performance Max campaigns