Google Ads AI Essentials: Ads Power Pair Best Practices

Proven strategies to drive results from your Search and Performance Max campaigns

The Ads Power Pair of Search and Performance Max uses the best of Google AI-powered solutions to deliver performance at scale for your marketing campaigns. In order to harness the Ads Power Pair to achieve your marketing goals, you need to provide a comprehensive set of inputs across ad assets, conversion values, first-party data, and more to steer Google AI effectively.  

Most retailers advertising with Google are already using Performance Max and seeing great results. Beyond retail, advertisers who adopt Performance Max see an average increase of 27% more conversions or value at a similar CPA/ROAS. This is even when they already use broad match and Smart Bidding in their Search campaigns.¹

Use the maximize conversion value Smart Bidding strategy to optimize your campaigns for conversions that are worth more to your business. This makes it possible to define the specific metrics you want Google AI to maximize, like sales revenue or profit margins.

Activate your first-party data in your campaigns using Customer Match. This helps Google AI understand who your most valuable customers are so you can reach more people like them. 

Keep your creative assets fresh by turning on automatically created assets. This will help you generate additional, highly relevant text assets that are well-matched to users’ queries and based on your ad's unique context—which includes your landing page, existing ads, and keywords in your ad group.

Unlock budget agility and maximize growth in your campaigns with confidence.

• Check budget recommendations to see if your campaigns are limited by budget—and if you can re-allocate budgets more effectively to capture incremental conversions. 
• Check bidding recommendations to see if you could gain more conversions or conversion value with a small change in your ROAS or CPA targets. 
• Use Performance Planner to understand how adjusting campaign budgets and bidding targets can help you drive growth in conversions at a profitable ROI.

Win new customers by optimizing your campaigns for new customer acquisition. It’s a new campaign goal that enables you to optimize your campaigns to bid higher for new customers or to bid for new customers exclusively. 

Customer Success Story

Itaú Unibanco, a Brazilian multinational financial services corporation headquartered in São Paulo, is the largest financial institution in Brazil and Latin America. The brand was already heavily invested in its Search campaigns and saw Performance Max as an opportunity to reach new potential customers before they went to competitors. Following Google Ads best practices—particularly for creative assets and asset groups—Itaú used the Power Pair to increase overall conversion volume by 29% at a 29% lower cost per acquisition.

Tips to take your Search campaigns to the next level

The ways people search are incredibly diverse and increasingly unpredictable. By simplifying your Search campaigns while using tools like broad match, you can make it easier for Google AI-powered solutions to drive better results for your business.

Simplify campaigns, ad groups, and keywords where possible. Grouping your keywords into similar themes makes it easier for Google to understand your keywords, select the best one, and determine which ad should serve for each user search. In addition, consolidating your data into similarly themed groups can help our AI-powered solutions deliver better results for you by giving it more performance history to learn from. 

• Segment campaigns based on business objectives rather than device or match type.
• Consolidate single-keyword or few-keyword ad groups into meaningful, similar themes. 
• Remove duplicate keywords and keywords with zero or low impression volume.  

Upgrade existing exact and phrase match keywords to broad match. This allows you to reach new, relevant searches and drive more conversions at the same CPA or ROAS with fewer total keywords. We’ve seen that, on average, advertisers that upgrade their exact match keywords to broad match in campaigns that use a target CPA can see an average of 35% more conversions.²

• Test the performance of broad match keywords by creating a one-click experiment directly from recommendations.

Improve Ad Strength. Make sure each ad group includes at least one responsive search ad with a 'Good' or 'Excellent' rating. 

• Make your ads more relevant to your keywords by including them in your headlines.
• Add as many unique headlines and descriptions as you can. 
• Include headlines of various lengths.

Add more asset types like your business name, logo, sitelinks, and images to show more helpful information about your business and create more compelling ads.

Customer Success Story

CarParts.com is an online provider of aftermarket auto parts that relied on phrase and exact match keywords to drive Search performance. In order to grow its reach, the brand decided to test broad match by converting a sample group of campaigns containing generic phrase match keywords. The test results were clear: by switching the same keywords from phrase to broad match, CarParts.com saw a 23% increase in revenue, along with a 16% increase in conversion rate and an 18% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS).

Best practices to get the most out of your Performance Max campaigns

Performance Max campaigns combine your marketing expertise and Google AI to help you find and convert your next customer across Google’s channels. Pair a wide variety of creative assets and first-party signals with optimizations like final URL expansion to drive more conversions at the best return on investment (ROI).

Turn on final URL expansion to find more converting search queries, and to send customers to the most relevant page on your website—the one that best matches their intent.

Provide a wide variety of text, image, and video assets to scale your creative for better results. This gives Google AI more options to find the best-performing combinations of assets that resonate with customers in different contexts and mindsets. 

• Use asset generation to create more text headlines and descriptions, and to bring your image ideas to life in seconds with generative AI.
• Access creative tools in the asset library:
  • Use image editing tools to build new variations of existing images.
  • Use video creation tools to easily build and upload your own videos.

Add signals that will help Google AI learn about your business and find you more relevant customers.

• Add search themes related to what your customers are searching for and which topics lead to conversions for your business.
• Activate consented first-party data from previous purchasers shared via Customer Match. This is the most valuable type of audience signal. 
• Add custom segments to provide insight into the search terms, website URLs, and apps your customers typically engage with.
• Refresh these lists frequently to ensure your campaign makes optimization decisions based on up-to-date information.

If you want to invest in more visual storytelling, use Demand Gen campaigns to maximize your presence on YouTube, Shorts, Discover, and Gmail. Create new demand and drive conversions on Google’s most immersive and entertainment-oriented surfaces where people stream, scroll, and connect. On average, advertisers that added Demand Gen to their Search and/or Performance Max campaigns saw 14% more conversions.³

We’ll continue to evolve these steps as new features come out. In the meantime, check out the Performance Max Top Questions hub to get answers to your most frequently asked questions. And read our in-depth Search and Performance Max best practices guides for additional tips to maximize campaign performance.

1. Google Data, Global, Ads, October 2023 - November 2023.
2. Google internal data, Global, April 2022.
3. Google Internal Data, April - May 2024.