You can use Performance Uplift experiments to measure the uplift or incremental benefit of using Performance Max with your existing Search, Video, and Display campaigns. To set up Uplift experiments for Performance Max:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
- Click Experiments.
- Click Performance Max campaign experiments.
- To create a new experiment, click the plus button
, and then click + Test uplift from Performance Max.
- Click Select campaign to select an existing Performance Max campaign for the experiment. Note that you can select only active campaigns for Uplift experiments. If you want to create a new campaign for your experiment, click Create new.
- Click Confirm.
- In the “Performance Max (treatment)” section, your selected campaign will be tested against an automatically selected list of comparable campaigns. You can update this list in the future.
- From the “Traffic split” section, select the traffic split percentage as “Treatment group” and “Control group”.
- Note: The traffic split is 50% by default.
- Click Next.
- View which campaigns are in each experiment arm in the “Test groups” section.
- To rename your campaign, click on the “Experiment name” field.
- Click the “Start date” drop-down to select the start date.
- Click Schedule.
Review or edit a campaign comparable to an existing Performance Max campaign
By default, comparable campaigns are excluded from reporting. Your Report page won’t show comparable Performance Max campaigns unless you enable comparable campaign reporting in Google Ads.
During the experiment, you’ll need to manually edit comparable campaigns, otherwise Google will choose the comparable campaigns for you. After the experiment has ended, you’ll be unable to add or remove your comparable campaigns.
- View results alongside comparable campaigns: To determine how your experiment performs compared to similar campaigns, enable the "View Results with Comparable Campaigns" toggle in Google Ads reporting.
- Edit comparable campaigns (until experiment ends): You have complete control over which campaigns are considered "comparable" throughout the experiment. Simply edit your selections within your Performance Max experiments. If you don't manually choose comparable campaigns, Google will automatically select them for you. Once the experiment ends, you won't be able to add or remove comparable campaigns from the results.
Important: It will take one day after the experiment starts to populate the list of comparable campaigns that were automatically chosen for the experiment. After the list is populated, you’ll get an option to edit the comparable campaign list, and add or remove any campaigns from your experiment. You can make these changes until the experiment concludes. Learn more about comparable campaigns.
