New Performance Max features: Assets experiments, video enhancements, and more

With the year coming to an end and the peak holiday season approaching, advertisers are laser-focused on maximizing their marketing ROI. Holiday demand and trends shift rapidly, making AI critical for success. Performance Max automatically harnesses the full power of Google AI across all of Google’s channels to identify the highest ROI ad opportunities and drive more conversions from your marketing budget. 

The results speak for themselves. In MMMs run by TransUnion among Retail & Consumer Electronics advertisers in the U.S., Google Performance Max campaigns drove 17% higher ROAS than AI-powered and automated performance campaigns on Paid Social in aggregate during the holiday peak period in Q4 2023.¹ 

To help you finish 2024 strong, we’re building on our recent announcements at DMEXCO and introducing new Performance Max features designed to:

• Improve your assets using experiments and generative AI
• Enhance your video ads
• Give you greater flexibility to use Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns together

1. Optimize your assets to better connect with your audience

Test the effectiveness of adding assets and using Final URL expansion

New experiments are rolling out soon within the Experiments page, allowing you to:

• Validate the impact of adding new assets beyond your product feed: Measure the uplift from adding images, text, and video assets to a product-feed only campaign. This will become available for retailers in beta in early November.
• Test Final URL expansion: These experiments are now moving to general availability. You can test this feature to determine if replacing your final URL with a more relevant landing page from your website drives stronger results by better matching a user’s search intent.

Generate even better visuals in Google Ads

Image generation in Google Ads is being updated with a version of Imagen 3, our most advanced text-to-image model, tuned using performance data across industries to help you create higher-performing assets for your Performance Max, Demand Gen, App, and Display campaigns. This means you can create high-quality visuals that truly resonate with your audience and drive better performance.

Share ad previews from Performance Max with product feeds and for travel goals

As announced earlier this year, we're rolling out shareable previews to make it easier for teams to collaborate on ad creative. These can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have a Google Ads login, to simplify your creative reviews and approvals. And now, they’re expanding to additional goal types so you can generate shareable previews of ads from your Performance Max campaigns with product feeds and for travel goals. 

2. Expand the reach of your video ads with enhancements paired with controls 

Scale your creativity on YouTube with AI-powered video enhancements

New video enhancements are rolling out now, allowing you to use Google AI to automatically create more versions of your existing video(s) so you can unlock additional YouTube inventory and performance opportunities.

• Flip video ads: Google AI intelligently flips your original video format and creates videos in new aspect ratios, ensuring key elements are preserved and your message shines across YouTube's diverse formats.
• Shorten video ads: Google AI intelligently selects key moments in your video and creates shorter versions while keeping your original message and appearance. 

All enhanced videos go through extensive quality evaluation before being approved and eligible for serving. And you’re in control—you can choose to opt out of this feature or remove the assets that don’t work for your business: 

• Performance Max: You have full control to remove specific enhanced videos from serving in your campaign. To do this, review these videos in the asset reporting tab and remove any unwanted ones. You can also disable the feature entirely from campaign settings.
• Video Action campaigns: Easily disable video enhancements from your campaign settings.
• Demand Gen campaigns: Currently, only flipping capabilities are available in Demand Gen, with shortening capabilities coming in 2025. Video enhancements in Demand Gen can be opted out at the video ad-level. 
• App campaigns: Your Google account manager can assist you in disabling this feature.

3. Get more flexibility to manage Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns together

We are changing how Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns interact. Now, if you are running Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns together, Performance Max will no longer be automatically prioritized when the campaigns are in the same account targeting the same products. Instead, Ad Rank will determine which campaign serves an ad. This is consistent with how Performance Max works together with other campaign types like Demand Gen.²

We’re excited for you to explore these new features and updates to optimize your campaigns and achieve your goals as we wrap up the year. 

Pallavi Naresh, Sagar Shah, and Enric Durany, Group Product Managers, Google Ads

 

 

1. Google-commissioned TransUnion PMax MMM Meta-Analysis, US, 125 Retail & Consumer Electronics MMM models, Q1 2022–Q4 2023. “Largest social platform by share of spend” defined based on Q1 2022–Q4 2023.
2.  Search keyword and match type prioritization remains in effect.